On Friday, November 6th at 03:18 UTC, a Long March 6 took off from LC-16 at the Taiyun Satellite Launch Centre in Shanxi Province in China, carrying ten Argentinian satellites — ÑuSats 9 through 18 — to orbit to join the Aleph-1 commercial earth observing satellite constellation operated by Satellogic S.A. 

Also on board were three Chinese small satellites that are either technology demonstrations or cooperative student projects.

Each Satellogic satellite weighs about 41 kilograms and will provide high-resolution optical imagery, and each one is named for a pioneering woman in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

The satellites are named after:

9. Alice Ball: a Black American chemist who developed the “Ball Method”, the most effective treatment for leprosy during the early 20th century. She was the first woman and first Black American to receive a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii and was also the university’s first female and Black American chemistry professor.

10. Caroline Herschel: a German astronomer, whose most significant contributions to astronomy were the discoveries of several comets. She was the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist. She was also the younger sister of astronomer William Herschel.

11. Cora Ratto de Sadosky: an Argentine mathematician, educator, and activist in support of human and women’s rights in Argentina and beyond.

12. Dorothy Vaughan: an American mathematician and computer who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and NASA, at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. In 1949, she became acting supervisor of the West Area Computers, the first Black American woman to supervise a group of staff at the center.

13. Emmy Noether: a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed the theories of rings, fields, and algebras. She proved a famous theorem in mathematical physics known as Noether’s theorem, which explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

14. Hedy Lamarr: an Austrian-American actress, inventor, and film producer. She was part of 30 films in an acting career spanning 28 years and co-invented an early version of the frequency-hopping spread spectrum with George Antheil. She also helped improve aviation designs for Howard Hughes. Although the U.S. Navy did not adopt Lamarr and Antheil’s invention until 1957, various spread-spectrum techniques are incorporated into Bluetooth technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of Wi-Fi.

15. Katherine Johnson: an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. As a part of the preflight checklist, John Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine.  “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” She was one of the first African-American women to work at NASA.

16. Lise Meitner: an Austrian-Swedish physicist who contributed to the discoveries of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on radioactivity, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and nephew-physicist Otto Robert Frisch discovered nuclear fission. According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated nineteen times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 29 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1965. Despite not having been awarded the Nobel Prize, Meitner was invited to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962. However, Meitner received many other honors, including the naming of chemical element 109 meitnerium in 1997.

17. Mary Jackson: an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at NACA, which in 1958 was succeeded by NASA. She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. She took advanced engineering classes and, in 1958, became NASA’s first black female engineer.

18. Vera Rubin: an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She went on to graduate studies at Cornell University and Georgetown University, where she observed deviations from Hubble flow in galaxies and provided evidence for the existence of galactic superclusters. Her data provided some of the first evidence for dark matter, which had been theorized by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s. She is the first woman to have a large observatory named after her: the National Science Foundation Vera C. Rubin Observatory (Rubin Observatory) in Chile.

More Information

Spaceflight Now article 

Beihangkongshi 1 info page (Gunter’s Space Page)