Hancom InSpace said it succeeded in ground-station communications with Sejong 3, South Korea's first privately developed hyperspectral satellite. It said it will move to commercialise services based on multidimensional spectral satellite data.

Sejong 3 was launched at 8:02 p.m. on March 30 (4:02 a.m. on March 30 local time in the United States) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It then succeeded in its first communications with a ground station, confirming the satellite body and system status were normal.

Sejong 3 is a 6U-class nanosatellite measuring 200 mm wide, 100 mm long and 340 mm high, and weighing about 10.8 kg. It carries out Earth-observation missions in low Earth orbit at an altitude of 500 to 600 km.

Hancom InSpace plans to shorten revisit cycles and strengthen data-fusion-based analysis capabilities through a cluster operations system linking Sejong 3 with the Sejong-series satellites it already operates. Based on its in-house AI analysis platform for multi-information fusion, InStation, it plans to expand tailored data services by industry, including agriculture, the environment and defence.

Choi Myung-jin (최명진), chief executive of Hancom InSpace, said: "Hyperspectral satellites mean a paradigm shift from simply 'seeing data' to 'understanding data' about what the subject is." He said: "By adding Sejong 3's unrivalled intelligence to the satellite data analysis system already in operation, we will take decision-making in industrial fields to a higher level and move to fully expand the data-based industrial ecosystem."