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.
This Saturday, a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket took off at 06:48 GMT from the US base in Vandenberg (California), having put several dozen satellites into orbit an hour later, including the Kenyan Taifa-1 (“Nation- 1”, in Swahili language).
Conceived and developed by a team of Kenyan researchers, this satellite should provide data in the areas of agriculture and environmental monitoring in Kenya, valuable for the future of this East African country, which is currently experiencing a historic drought.
In a joint statement last week, the Kenyan Defense Ministry and the Kenya Space Agency (KSA) announced “an important step” that should boost Kenya’s “burgeoning space economy.”
“We directly benefit from space exploration, we will be able to improve our food security,” KSA Pattern engineer Odhiambo, who was involved in the project, told French news agency AFP.
As he explained, through the images of the satellite’s multispectral camera, it will be possible to obtain “high-quality Earth observation data, which will help predict crop yields.”
Kenya sent its first nanosatellite into space in 2018.
By 2022, more than 50 African satellites have been sent into space, according to Space in Africa, a Nigerian company that tracks African space programs, with Egypt being the first country on the continent to do so in 1998.
Source: Observadora
