Back in November 2021, Adafruit blogged about how the Sony’s Spresense microcontroller board was launched into space as part of a payload for the Innovative Satellite Technology Demonstration No. 2 on the RAISE-2 satellite by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

The tasks of this first mission on the RAISE-2 satellite have been completed and the results are back.

All six test parts of the mission are declared to have the status “Going well”.

• The commercially available Spresense main board and Spresense camera board were both confirmed to operate without failure during rocket launch and in Earth orbit in the environment of space.
• The Spresense main board successfully obtained satellite positioning using the built-in positioning module. Satellite positioning requires special firmware.
• Attitude estimation by the data acquired by the Spresense boards from the GNSS antenna array  and by the phase difference of the positioning satellite carrier wave will be verified in the future.
• Attitude estimation using camera images like star trackers will be verified in the future.

Everything looks promising, but further missions are needed to confirm the operation of the GNSS antenna technology, and to optimize the operation of space-facing cameras for satellite attitude estimation.

See more via Sony Developer World, via Twitter.