Capella Space became a market leader by being the first LEO satellite operator to leverage the enhanced functionality of IDRS to offer an unprecedented level of responsiveness to its customers.

The first LEO satellite operator to leverage IDRS

On-demand, 24/7 communication capability

Data transfers reduced from hours to minutes

On November 12th 2020, at 10:14am PST, the on-demand Inter-satellite Data Relay System service was successfully commissioned on Capella Space’s Sequoia satellite.

This demonstrated live data connectivity between customer Capella Space’s Control Center and its recently launched Sequoia satellite at low earth orbit, ushering in the Commercial Service Introduction (CSI) of Viasat and Addvalue Innovation’ IDRS service after five years of development.

The Capella satellite, situated in low earth orbit, now communicates with Viasat’s I-4 satellite network (operating at the L-band spectrum and sitting in a high earth, geostationary orbit) to overcome the high latency commonly encountered with ground station operators.

Since November 2020 Capella has launched 6 more satellites (the second generation of “Whitney” satellites), and is now flying a constellation of 7 satellites in space, all of them with IDRS on-board.

We’re proud to team-up with Viasat and Addvalue to be the first to deliver an entirely new level of efficiency and functionality to our customers. This real-time connectivity allows us to significantly reduce the time between customer tasking requests and when we collect the data on-orbit.

Christian Lenz - Vice President of Engineering at Capella Space

More than speed

The benefits that IDRS brings to Capella Space go beyond the speed at which clients receive their data and images

Capella now has the opportunity to remain in near-constant contact and control of their constellation, bringing significant operational efficiencies for satellite tasking and operations. The use of IDRS allows observation of the satellite state-of-health and rapid retasking, even when out of contact with traditional ground stations. For moderns operators like Capella who use a high degree of automation in their satellite operations, significant efficiency gains are possible with the addition of the IRDS system on each satellite added to the Capella constellation.