HEO @heospace

This rocket body has dropped approximately 20 kilometers in altitude over the past year. HEO characterised Object H (51953) as a Long March 2C rocket body, the upper stage from a launch on March 5, 2022 out of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The vehicle carried six demonstration satellites for GalaxySpace, a Chinese commercial operator building toward a low-Earth orbit broadband constellation, alongside a secondary passenger, a 6U remote sensing CubeSat. The GalaxySpace cluster was intended to validate broadband data relays, in-space networking, and integrated remote sensing and communications technologies. Non-Earth Imaging (NEI) lets us monitor and characterise an object as its orbit decays, and it resolves the ambiguity that follows any launch, separating active payloads from spent stages and debris, establishing not just which object is which but what it is capable of and what it is doing in orbit. In this NEI mission, the payload adapter is visible, the structure that mated the satellites to the rocket. From the image, HEO derived an engine length of 3.38 metres, a tank section of 7.08 metres, and a payload adapter length of 4.67 metres. Collections like this one carry high image plane velocities, so we applied our proprietary deblurring tool to recover details for characterisation. *Measured in the 2D image plane. Any extension into the image plane is not captured, so this figure represents a minimum. The true length may be greater.

Trust in orbit depends on evidence, not assumption. At the International Space Summit 2026, HEO's Co-Founder and CTO Hiranya Jayakody joined a conversation with LEOLabs, SPACEMAP, and Spaceflux on how collecting evidence and information will create transparency and move us all forward in space. Make space transparent.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

Running rings around Earth. HEO identified and characterised Object D as the CZ-2D interstage ring, the structural section that holds the two stages of a Long March 2D together and is cast off during ascent once the stages separate. This Non-Earth Imaging mission was taken from 59 km away at an average image resolution of 13 cm/px.

The age of a satellite has no bearing on our ability to image it. What matters more is its position in orbit and its size. The constraint with something like Vanguard 1 is that there is very little structure to resolve at that size. That said, we continue to launch cameras into diverse orbits to widen coverage, so that we have both the proximity and resolution required to image anything.

A satellite from before the first website existed. SPOT 2 launched in January 1990 as the second satellite in CNES's SPOT series, France's pioneering civil Earth-observation programme. It carried two High Resolution Visible imagers and introduced steerable mirrors that let it look to either side of its ground track, a real advance over the nadir-only systems of the era. When CNES ended the mission in 2009, it lowered the orbit so the satellite would reenter on a shorter timeline. HEO characterised the object at 22 cm/px from roughly 147 km away as it passed off the coast of Russia. Non-Earth Imaging, where one space object images another, is how a satellite designed to look down at Earth can itself be inspected in orbit decades after its mission ended, and long after the people who operated it stopped communicating with it.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

This is the spent upper stage of India's LVM3-M2, imaged here at 14 cm/pixel. The rocket's first dedicated commercial mission, flown in October 2022, placed 36 OneWeb satellites into orbit, executing a nine-phase deployment sequence across 75 minutes to deliver the heaviest payload ISRO had ever flown at the time. HEO characterised this object from a distance of 34.54 km. The collection shows the structure is largely intact and we’re able to resolve its attitude and condition after three years in orbit. As proximity operations become a reality rather than a future prospect, the ability to approach, interact with, or deorbit an object depends on knowing its current physical state. Historical imagery of this kind also establishes a baseline: what the object was, when, and in what condition. If its status changes, whether through fragmentation, collision, or degradation, that record becomes an attribution resource.

@astronomy1002 Close! This exact one is the fourth stage of the PSLV-C15

This upper stage has been orbiting Earth since 2010. Can you identify it?

@WhiteRoseOnTour That's the one!

@Skyrocket71 Bingo!

@yudkus02 This is an older capture from July 2025

This satellite outlasted its design life by nearly 26 years. Launched in March 1984 with a three-year design life, Landsat 5 went on to complete more than 150,000 orbits, transmit over 2.5 million images of Earth's surface, and hold a record as the longest-operating Earth-observing satellite in history. When its successor failed to reach orbit in 1993, Landsat 5 was already a decade past retirement, but it kept collecting. It received its final command in 2013 and manoeuvred to a lower orbit and silenced its transmitter for good. HEO characterised Landsat 5 through Non-Earth Imaging and the collection shows the solar panel is deployed, its high gain antenna extends from the central body, and the spacecraft is tumbling. As the on-orbit servicing and debris removal economy develops, the ability to approach, interact with, or deorbit an object depends on knowing its current physical state, its attitude, its configuration, and how it is behaving in orbit. NEI will help you know before you go.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

What happens when the satellites driving the global economy need attention? At the Resilience Summit in Sydney yesterday, HEO's CEO Dr William Crowe joined the Above the Noise panel to discuss what the growth of the space economy demands of the industry. He highlighted HEO's plans to use our non-Earth imaging technology to enable the emerging inspection and maintenance layer in space, operating in Low-Earth Orbit today, with Geosynchronous Orbit firmly in our sights.

@Part107Flyer It's a recent image! The adaptor is still orbiting at ~430km altitude

This is the rideshare adapter that carried 143 satellites on Transporter-1. On January 24, 2021, SpaceX's Falcon 9 launched 143 spacecraft to orbit on a single vehicle, setting a record that still stands today. HEO's Continuum-1 imaged the adapter from 60km away, at 13cm/pixel resolution, over the Arctic Ocean.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

@CamGableX Incredible

Two years ago, @esa and @JAXA_en launched EarthCARE to improve our understanding of how clouds and aerosols affect our climate. HEO collected this image from ~100 km away at a resolution of 22 cm/pixel, close enough to resolve individual structural features of EarthCARE. The solar array is visible, fully deployed and sun-facing, alongside the deployed cloud profiling radar. Congratulations to all of the teams involved on two years of climate science in orbit.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

When HEO acquired Continuum-1, we committed to using it to catalogue objects in low-Earth orbit (LEO). Part of that work means turning attention to derelict hardware. As noted in the recent issue of the @IntegrityISR Flash, CZ-6A upper stages are a growing concern to the sustainability of LEO as they have produced some of the largest fragmentation clouds in LEO in recent years. These rocket bodies are left in orbits that will take years to decay, with no means of manoeuvre and no plan for removal. This is one of them. Continuum-1 imaged this CZ-6A rocket body in orbit. It is the upper stage from the October 31, 2023 launch that carried the Tianhui 5A and 5B satellites. It appears largely intact and is gravity-gradient stabilised. Images like these establish a baseline. If the object's state changes, that deviation is observable and comparable against something real. Attribution is rarely straightforward after a fragmentation event. A prior record can make the difference between knowing something happened and knowing why. Reference: isruniversity.com/2026/05/19/iss…

HEO has a #NoUFOPolicy. Objects we image leave with an identity and characterisation, as it is critical to identify space objects to maintain space and Earth safety. For example, this object is currently listed as Object A in public tracking databases, a designation assigned to newly launched objects pending formal cataloguing. HEO has imaged and characterised it as the Lingxi 03 communications satellite, a designation corroborated by publicly available information on the mission. When identities and capabilities in orbit remain obscure, whether by cataloguing lag, sparse public data, or the absence of independent characterisation, operators work with an incomplete understanding. Unknown no longer has to be a permanent state. *Measured in the 2D image plane. Any extension into the image plane is not captured, so this figure represents a minimum. The true length may be greater.

This is how we make space transparent. Most space activity has never been visually observed. No image, no confirmation, no clear record of what happened or why. Despite rapid advancements in satellite technology, the ability to see what’s up there remained largely absent. To meet the moment, we need persistent, scalable, autonomous visual awareness of space. That's why we built HEO Inspect. HEO Inspect is the web app and API interface to our core non-Earth imaging and insights that tasks our constellation, processes every collection automatically, and delivers finished insights. Underpinning it is our proprietary software that runs NEI operations autonomously at scale, replacing what would otherwise require significant manual effort from specialised engineers. Make space transparent.