First OPS-SAT photos capture frosty fjord

At almost 11 pm local time, the Sun was still shining over this impressive large glacier near the town of Pyramiden in central Svalbard. One of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas, Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. On 26 July 2020, during commissioning of the high-definition camera and at an altitude of over 500 km, OPS-SAT took this cool image.

The long, horizontal body of water that runs through the image is the notorious 32 km long Austfjorden fjord of Svalbard.

A flying laboratory, OPS-SAT is the very first of its kind. With an experimental computer ten times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft, the 30-cm high cubesat is devoted to demonstrating drastically improved mission control capabilities that will arise when satellites can fly more powerful on-board computers. Find out more about the mission, and how you could apply to use it to test out your experiment in space.