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SNC, the global aerospace and national security company, and Muon Space, the Mission Foundry for high-performance satellite constellations, announce the successful launch and initial contact with three next-generation Vindlér satellites. All three satellites have been confirmed healthy and are undergoing commissioning, marking the operational debut of SNC’s Vindlér 2.0 constellation, powering unprecedented commercial radio frequency (RF) data collection and analytics services.
Vindlér detects and geo-locates targeted RF emissions, enabling operators to identify and track items of interest for enhanced situational awareness and decision making in complex environments. The technology is specifically designed to address a growing national security and commercial need for timely, precise RF data.
SNC partnered with Muon Space to launch three satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base on SpaceX’s Transporter-16 rideshare mission. Muon Space is an end-to-end space systems provider that designs, builds and operates mission-optimized, low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. SNC’s RF technology, diverse data sets and analytic capabilities, coupled with Muon's scalable design, instrument development and operations support, will bring to life a new level of commercial possibilities with an emphasis on low-latency delivery and prioritizing immediate intelligence dissemination.
“With the launch of Vindlér 2.0, we are fundamentally reshaping the commercial RF market,” said Charlie Howell, vice president of programs at SNC. “This constellation delivers a level of precision and data richness that legacy systems simply can’t match. By pairing SNC’s decades of RF and ISR experience with on-orbit processing and low-latency delivery, we’re giving operators information they can act on at the speed of the mission.”
Leveraging a more than 60-year legacy of RF, electronic warfare systems and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance solutions, SNC’s Vindlér technology can simultaneously detect a wide range of emitters from VHF to Ka-band with high accuracy and throughputs rivaling or exceeding entire competitor constellations. Critical applications include GPS jamming and spoofing detection, maritime domain awareness, dark vessel tracking and more in support of national security efforts. This technology is particularly critical when evaluating operations in contested or denied access areas.
Thanks to high-capacity downlinks, robust inter-satellite links and automated onboard processing, Vindlér can compress and analyze RF data in orbit, reducing raw data volumes and accelerating delivery. SNC states that intelligence can move from collection to operational users in as little as four hours, a stark contrast to the multi-day timelines common with legacy systems. The advanced RF solution also features multi-modal analytics with twice-daily downlink revisits, ensuring timely and precise data delivery.
“Vindlér brings together SNC's deep RF sensing and ELINT heritage with Muon's flight-proven spacecraft platform,” said Jonny Dyer, CEO of Muon Space. “The result is a purpose-built constellation delivering mission-grade RF geolocation and same-day tasking at the scale today’s operations demand.”
The satellites, built on the Condor-M platform, are substantially larger and more capable than prior commercial RF collectors. The platform enables AI to be integrated directly into the onboard processing chain – allowing more intelligent analysis to be performed in space before downlink, reducing latency and increasing the actionability of delivered intelligence.
Over the next several years, SNC plans to increase the constellation to more than 20 satellites, all of which will collect additional RF bands and provide multiple revisits throughout the day. The company will continue work on the Vindlér program from its facility in Herndon, Virginia, which is also home to the company’s state-of-the-art technology integration and demonstration facility known as The Grid.
