Iran's Pars-1 Satellite Launch

Iran successfully put a domestically developed satellite, Pars-1, into a 500-km orbit via a Soyuz rocket launch in eastern Russia, state media reported.

The 134-kg satellite, built by the Iranian Space Research Institute, is designed for remote-sensing applications and testing technologies for future satellites.

A Russian rocket successfully put an Iranian satellite into orbit, a launch that underlined increasingly close cooperation between Moscow and Tehran.

Russia's state-run Roscosmos corporation said that a Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Vostochny launch facility in the country's far east to carry the Iranian satellite and 18 Russian satellites into orbit.

The satellite, equipped with three cameras that can capture Earth images in visible, short-wave infrared and thermal infrared ranges, can cover 95 percent of Iran's territory in less than 100 days and the whole country in less than 45 days with its night-vision capability.

Hassan Salarieh, head of the Iranian Space Agency, said at a press conference that Pars-1 was the 12th satellite launched under the current administration, which took office in August 2021.

He said Iran would launch another satellite, Pars-2, with a higher resolution of 8 meters per pixel, in the next Iranian year starting on March 20.

Late last month, Iran launched a homegrown rocket from a launch site in central Iran, sending a communication and research satellite and two nanosatellites to an elliptic orbit with a minimum altitude of 450 km.

The satellite will be put into orbit around the North and South Poles, synchronized to be in the same fixed position relative to the Sun, and will be fully functional after a calibration of its systems.

This launch comes after Russia put into orbit the Iranian Khayyam satellite in 2022.