Kenya’s first operational satellite was put into orbit this Saturday by a SpaceX rocket that took off from California (United States), according to images from the US space company. The launch, originally scheduled for Monday night in the United States, has been postponed several times this week due to bad weather conditions.
On Saturday, a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket lifted off at 06:48 GMT from the US base in Vandenberg, California, before deploying several dozen satellites an hour later, including the Kenyan Taifa-1 (“Nation-1” , in Swahili). language).
Designed and developed by a team of Kenyan researchers, this satellite should provide data in the fields of agriculture and environmental monitoring in Kenya, valuable for the future of this East African country which is currently experiencing a historic drought.
A boost to the “space economy”
In a joint statement, the Kenyan Ministry of Defense and the Kenya Space Agency (KSA) last week touted “an important step” that should boost Kenya’s “fledgling space economy.”
With the images from the satellite’s multispectral camera, “we will be able to have high-quality earth observation data, which will help us predict crop yields,” he explained.
Kenya sent its first nanosatellite into space in 2018. As of 2022, more than 50 African satellites have been sent into space, according to Space in Africa, a Nigerian company that tracks African space programs. Egypt was the first country on the continent to send a satellite into space in 1998.
Source: BFM TV
