The partners said the mission, funded from their own coffers, will pair Impulse’s highly manoeuvrable Mira spacecraft with Anduril’s software-defined payloads to show faster, lower-cost options for close-proximity operations around critical satellites.
As space becomes more contested and congested, the companies argue, the ability to manoeuvre and protect on-orbit assets is essential.
RPO activities give operators the capacity to approach, image and inspect resident space objects (RSOs) and to perform precise relative navigation capabilities seen as increasingly important as potential adversaries develop counter-space systems.
Historically, RPO missions have been costly, complex and slow to field. The Anduril–Impulse flight aims to shorten that timeline by combining Impulse’s Deneb-powered Helios kick stage and Mira spacecraft with Anduril’s mission data processor (MDP), long-wave infrared imager and third-party sensors.
Under the plan, the Helios stage will ride a commercial launcher to low-Earth orbit and then transfer across orbits to deliver Mira to GEO in under a day – a faster and, the companies said, more affordable alternative to direct-to-GEO insertion or protracted electric-propulsion orbit raises via geosynchronous transfer orbit.
Once in GEO, Mira will separate, Helios will be moved to a graveyard orbit, and the spacecraft will begin its RPO demonstrations.
The demonstration will test long-wave acquisition tracking and high-precision close-range navigation in GEO’s challenging environment.
Mira will image designated RSOs, process that imagery on board, and autonomously perform a sequence of precise manoeuvres to observe targets from multiple vantage points validating both hardware and software performance for edge processing and autonomous mission management in a high-radiation, communications-limited theatre.
Anduril said the mission will host its Lattice software and RPO flight code on the MDP, providing the edge-processing and software interoperability to share data quickly across payloads, third-party sensors and the Mira bus. The company also noted this is its fourth space demonstration funded through Independent Research and Development spending.
Beyond RPO, Anduril and Impulse said they expect the collaboration to support a broader set of national security and defence missions that require advanced propulsion, in-space mobility, on-orbit autonomy and resilient command and control.