Li Chuan is the Chief Designer of the original Xihe mission’s scientific and application system at Nanjing University’s School of Astronomy and Space Science.

The Xihe-2 payload includes an Extreme Ultraviolet Imager to observe the solar corona in two key wavelengths for capturing the evolution of pre-eruption magnetic flux ropes and current sheet structures during flares.

Ding Mingde is a Nanjing University professor who is the Chief Scientist of the first Xihe mission and a participant in Xihe-2.

Xihe-2 will take approximately 480 days to travel from Earth to the Sun-Earth L5 Lagrange point.

The Xihe-2 payload includes a Coronal and Heliospheric Imaging Package with a white-light coronagraph to image coronal mass ejection initiation and early acceleration near the Sun and a heliospheric imager to track their propagation through interplanetary space.

The Xihe-2 payload includes an In-Situ Detection Package to measure solar wind plasma parameters, energetic particles across multiple energy ranges, and interplanetary magnetic field vectors at the L5 point.

The precursor Xihe mission, formally called the Chinese H-alpha Solar Explorer (CHASE), launched in October 2021.

All approved and proposed Xihe missions are named after the mythological deity Xihe.

As of December 2025, the CHASE (Xihe) spacecraft has transmitted 1.2 petabits of scientific data.

NASA defines Lagrange points as positions in space where the gravitational pull of two large masses precisely equals the centripetal force required for a small object to move with them, allowing spacecraft to reduce fuel consumption needed to remain in position.

Xihe-2 will operate at the L5 point for at least five years.

Xihe-2 (羲和二号) is formally named the Lagrange-V solar observatory (LAVSO).

Xihe-2 will study the generation and evolution of solar magnetic fields and their links to solar eruptions and harmful space weather.

Xihe-2 is planned to launch on a Long March 3C from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

The Xihe-2 mission is scheduled to begin between November 2028 and July 2029.

The Xihe-2 spacecraft has a mass of 1,700 kilograms.

A proposed Xihe-3 mission in the 2030s would operate in an inclined orbit to observe the solar poles.

In Chinese mythology, Xihe is one of the wives of Emperor Di Jun and is described as the mother of ten suns that lived in a mulberry tree and were represented as three-legged crows.

A spacecraft based at the Sun-Earth L5 point can detect active regions on the Sun roughly four to five days earlier than instruments located near Earth.

Xihe-2 aims to downlink 230 gigabits of data per day.

Xihe-2 will be the first spacecraft stationed at the Sun-Earth L5 point.

The maiden flight of the Ariane 64 is tasked with deploying 32 satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper.

Europe has been without its own heavy-lift capability since the retirement of the Ariane 5 in 2023.

The post‑Ariane 5 launch gap forced European institutional missions to rely on American rockets.

The Ariane 64 is the most powerful configuration of Europe’s new heavy-lift launcher family Ariane 6.

The Ariane 64 uses the Vinci re-ignitable upper stage to deploy satellites into multiple different orbits during a single mission.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper plans a 3,236-satellite low Earth orbit broadband constellation.

Ariane 6 is scheduled under a multi-year agreement to launch a significant portion of Amazon’s planned Project Kuiper constellation.

The Ariane 64 provides a heavy-lift alternative to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for global satellite operators and European defense agencies.

A countdown took place at the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou marking the final hours before the maiden flight of the Ariane 64.

The Ariane 64 is capable of carrying large payloads to Low Earth Orbit and Geostationary Transfer Orbit.

The Ariane 64 configuration features four P120C solid rocket boosters.

ArianeGroup’s manufacturing facilities in France and Germany use horizontal assembly and 3D-printed components to reduce costs and complexity compared to the Ariane 5 predecessor.

Speculative venture capital in speculative space markets like balloon internet and asteroid mining has declined and is being replaced by defense procurement focused on reliable hardware, verified answers, and data sovereignty.

AI hallucination in automated imagery analysis creates a risk of false positives that can lead to wasted munitions or diplomatic incidents in kinetic kill chains.

Thales Alenia Space signed a contract to provide Earth observation capabilities to Indonesia.

Privateer reports that an increasing share of industry revenue is coming from sales of whole satellites and other hardware, reflecting strategic industrialization of the space sector.

Human analysts’ roles are shifting from counting objects to policing and verifying AI algorithm outputs in imagery analysis workflows.

Enabled Intelligence holds a $708 million contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for geospatial/analytics services.

Thales Alenia Space builds Copernicus sentinels for European science and supplies space infrastructure to export clients where 99% of the need is for defense applications.

The Earth observation sector received $10.4 billion in investment over the last year directed toward hardware-heavy infrastructure for Great Power Competition.

Countries in the Asia Pacific region around Indonesia are seeking sovereign Earth observation capabilities that avoid shared-infrastructure and cloud-based systems.

The industry trend toward reducing latency is driving placement of compute and processing on satellites to filter data and send only answers to ground stations.

KSAT USA identifies latency reduction as the primary unmet need in imaging and prioritizes faster data delivery.

Nations seeking sovereign capabilities want to own the satellite, control the shutter, and keep their data off the cloud.

Tipping and cueing is the automated process by which a wide-area sensor detects a target and instantly triggers a high-resolution camera to identify it.

The WCore architecture enables secure integration of iDirectGov-hosted and third-party applications such as AES encryption and Communication Signal Interference Removal (CSIR) technology without requiring deep hardware-level modifications for each waveform.

The 450 Software-Defined Modem reduces Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) for the U.S. Department of Defense by replacing multiple dedicated modems with a single software-defined unit.

iDirectGov’s Waveform Development Kit (WDK) allows third-party developers to provide encrypted cores that interact with iDirectGov hardware through secure, predefined interfaces.

The live test used iDirectGov’s Virtualized Waveform Core (WCore) to run high-performance waveforms without compromising security or hardware efficiency.