PROJECT ALTAIR

Our partner project, ORCASat, a CubeSat version of the optical source of ALTAIR, was launched aboard CRS-26 from Kennedy Space Center up to the International Space Station (ISS) on Nov. 26, 2022, then deployed out of the ISS into its own low Earth orbit on Dec. 29, 2022. ORCASat re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on July 7, 2023, after several extremely useful observation attempts using DECam on the Blanco 4m and at multiple other telescopes around the world. ALTAIR will be approx. 20x closer to its observing telescopes than ORCASat was ( 20 km altitude vs. 400 km), and thus approx. 20 2 = 400x brighter than ORCASat. Thus, ALTAIR will be much brighter and more easily observable using telescopes of all aperture sizes than ORCASat was able to be.