MDA Space announces AURORA as the name of its new software-defined satellite product line

Game-changing product positions company at the forefront of transition from analog to digital satellite technology

MDA Space unveiled AURORA as the name of its new software-defined satellite product line at the Satellite 2024 Conference in Washington, D.C.

Designed to meet the changing and highly competitive technical and business requirements of the satellite industry, the fully integrated AURORA portfolio provides operators with unparalleled flexibility and functionality, which dramatically enhances constellation performance at reduced cost and time to market.

"Reflecting the dawn of a new era of digital satellite communications, we are proud to introduce AURORA, our transformational software-defined satellite product line," said Mike Greenley, CEO of MDA Space. "Delivering best-in-class satellite performance, attractive economics and more cost-effective constellation solutions, we are honoured to have already secured two customers for AURORA, including Telesat as the anchor customer."

Key features of the MDA AURORA product line include:

• A new class of standardized and modular software-defined satellites enabled by a suite of innovative digital payload technologies that meet multiple non-geostationary orbits and frequencies, with dynamic in-orbit reconfiguration, maximizing delivered capacity and quality of service to users with unprecedented power efficiency.
• A scalable regenerative on-board processor with a built-in software-defined packet router, optimizing communication routes within a constellation between user links, gateway links and optical inter-satellite links.
• A family of digital beamforming-enabled electronically-steered direct radiating arrays with direct RF conversion and native beam hopping capability compliant to DVB standards.
• An innovative constellation software suite comprised of advanced onboard flight telecom software, a real-time digital payload simulator and a scalable constellation network manager.
• An advanced satellite platform, designed for constellations and optimized for digital payloads and high volume manufacturing.
• An efficient and modular digital payload solution designed for advanced manufacturing leveraging automated production lines and AI-enabled robots, cobots and high-skilled assemblers using augmented reality to accelerate mass production, enabling faster delivery at substantially reduced cost.

The news follows the company's recently announced rebrand to MDA Space, an evolution that highlights the company's extraordinary growth in recent years, with an expanding operational footprint and a rapidly growing workforce in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.