New Delhi: Two months after launch, the world’s first OptoSAR satellite, Drishti, failed and is lost in space, said Bengaluru-based startup GalaxEye in a press release Tuesday. The satellite faced an anomaly because of a geomagnetic storm, and the team has lost all communication with it.
“While recovery efforts are ongoing, the likelihood of recovery currently appears low,” said the press release. Drishti, the world’s first OptoSAR imaging satellite, was also the largest satellite launched by India’s private sector, weighing 190 kg. It was launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on 3 May 2026, marking the world’s first satellite launch that combined optical imagery and classic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to provide a new, improved form of earth observation.
Mission Drishti, as the launch was called, was celebrated globally, including by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said it marked a major achievement in India’s space journey. It was the first satellite launched by GalaxEye. The company plans to launch a series of OptoSAR satellites to build a constellation and help refine earth observation for defence, agriculture, disaster management, and maritime monitoring services.
While the satellite was able to launch successfully and even establish communication within the first few weeks, it did not complete the Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP) entirely. The press release shared by the company said that a geomagnetic solar storm, which is a phenomenon in which flares and radiation emanate from the Sun, damaged a critical component of the satellite’s systems.
After this, the communication with the satellite was reduced until it fully stopped. The company said they are still in the process of recovering communications, but the chances remain low. The company did not reveal when the geomagnetic storm occurred, or when they lost communication with the satellite.
However, sources in GalaxEye said that their mission control team had been working for two months to restore communications with the satellite, indicating that the anomaly might have happened days into the launch. They also said that after this incident, the company is conducting a comprehensive review of all aspects of Mission Drishti, including its various supply chains, while it moves forward with the other OptoSAR satellite launches.
“For a few weeks, we watched something we had built with our own hands come alive above the planet. Then, after those early weeks of operations, Drishti stopped performing the way we had dreamed it would,” said Suyash Singh, founder of GalaxEye, in a post on X.
Singh added that GalaxEye is working on other satellites in the OptoSAR constellation and plans to launch two more, weighing 300 kg, in the next couple of years.
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Initial problems, future plans
Barely a week after the Drishti satellite launched, open-source satellite trackers had pointed out issues in the satellite’s movement in space. Quoting data from the Satellite Networked Open-Ground Station, trackers had pointed out that Drishti was “tumbling in orbit” at the rate of about 3 degrees per second, which indicated that it had not stabilised yet.
The satellite was rotating with poor control in space at a speed of 3 degrees every second, completing a full rotation in about two minutes. A sustained tumble at this rate could interfere with communications, imaging, and power generation, and indicated a problem with the spacecraft’s attitude control system.
At the time, Singh said on X that people should “hold on” before speculating about Drishti’s health.
“Love the interest in Drishti. Never saw this level of interest or info floating around on previously launched sats,” Singh wrote. “Hold on buddy, Not everyday these kind of satellites get launched. If something is wrong, we will let the world know. Keep calm.”
In the press release shared on 7 July, the company said that before losing communication, Drishti had validated critical technologies and operational processes of the satellite, and for the first few weeks, it even operated onboard computing and communication infrastructure well. The company would now focus on the other satellites in the OptoSAR constellation.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)