Bengaluru-based space technology startup GalaxEye has confirmed that its pioneering Mission Drishti — the world's first OptoSAR imaging satellite and India's largest privately built Earth observation satellite — has lost communication following a geomagnetic solar storm that damaged a critical onboard system during the final stage of its Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP). In a statement released July 7, 2026, the company confirmed that while recovery efforts are continuing, "the likelihood of restoring contact currently appears low," effectively acknowledging that the groundbreaking mission has been compromised. Despite the setback, GalaxEye says the satellite successfully validated key technologies before the anomaly occurred and is now pressing ahead with plans to launch two next-generation OptoSAR satellites within the next 24 months.
Mission Drishti was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on May 3, 2026. After deployment, the satellite successfully established communication with GalaxEye's Mission Control Centre in Bengaluru and completed a significant portion of its LEOP — validating critical spacecraft systems including deployment mechanisms, attitude control, onboard computing, and communications infrastructure. The mission was personally recognized by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for its significance to India's private space ecosystem and global Earth observation capabilities. Then came the solar storm.
What Happened: Extreme Space Weather Strikes During Final LEOP Phase
GalaxEye confirmed that the spacecraft encountered an anomaly during the final stage of its Launch and Early Orbit Phase following a geomagnetic solar storm. Preliminary analysis conducted by the mission team indicates that radiation associated with the extreme space weather event likely affected a critical onboard system. Communication with the satellite subsequently became intermittent and was eventually lost entirely. The specific system affected has not been publicly disclosed, but the description of radiation damage to a critical component is consistent with damage to power regulation, attitude control, or computing systems — all of which are highly vulnerable to energetic particle events from solar activity in low Earth orbit.
Geomagnetic storms of sufficient severity to damage satellite systems are caused by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Sun — massive bursts of plasma and magnetic field that, when directed at Earth, can cause rapid and intense fluctuations in the planet's magnetic field. Satellites in Sun-Synchronous Low Earth Orbit (SSO-LEO) — the orbital plane Mission Drishti operates in, at an altitude of approximately 500-600 km — are particularly exposed to energetic particle flux during strong geomagnetic events, especially near the polar regions where the Earth's magnetic shielding is weakest. For the latest full coverage of GalaxEye's announcement and Mission Drishti's status, see the original IANS report at IANS.
What Is OptoSAR — and Why Mission Drishti Was a World First
Mission Drishti's primary innovation — the one that made it a genuinely unprecedented satellite — was its OptoSAR payload, a system that co-locates two fundamentally different imaging sensors on a single satellite platform for the first time in commercial Earth observation history. Traditional Earth observation satellites choose one of two approaches. Optical sensors — essentially high-resolution cameras — deliver visually intuitive, richly detailed images, but are completely blocked by cloud cover and cannot operate at night. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors use microwave radar signals that penetrate cloud cover and operate day and night — but produce imagery that is significantly harder for non-experts to interpret and requires complex processing before it can be practically used.
Mission Drishti's OptoSAR payload solved both problems simultaneously by co-locating a high-resolution SAR sensor and a 7-band multispectral imager on the same satellite — capturing both data streams in a single orbital pass and delivering inherently aligned, analysis-ready fused imagery with three times more information than a standalone sensor. This fusion approach eliminates the need to source optical and SAR data from separate satellites, separately process them, and attempt to align images captured at different times and angles — a fundamental limitation of every prior commercial Earth observation system. When cloud cover obscures optical imaging, Mission Drishti was designed to use onboard artificial intelligence to regenerate optical-like images directly from the SAR data — making complex satellite imagery interpretable by non-expert users in real time.
Early Warning Signs: Amateur Trackers Spotted Trouble in May
The solar storm anomaly announcement was the formal confirmation of a concern that had been circulating in the amateur satellite tracking community since shortly after Mission Drishti's May 3 launch. Multiple trackers using data from the Satellite Networked Open Ground Station (SatNOGS) — a free, open-source global network of ground stations — had noted that the satellite appeared to be tumbling in orbit at approximately 3 degrees per second, or roughly one complete rotation every two minutes, ever since deployment. The handle @Astro_Neel on X raised the concern publicly, writing: "So are we all going to just casually ignore the fact that in the publicly available open-source data, anyone can see that Drishti is still tumbling in orbit?" GalaxEye founder Suyash Singh at the time urged the community to "hold on" before speculating, promising transparency if something was wrong: "If something is wrong, we will let the world know." The July 7 announcement fulfilled that commitment — though its contents were far from the good news the space community had hoped for.
What GalaxEye Achieved Before the Loss
Despite the satellite's ultimate fate, GalaxEye is clear-eyed about what Mission Drishti accomplished before the solar storm anomaly ended its operational life. The mission successfully demonstrated GalaxEye's full in-house mission operations capability through its Bengaluru Mission Control Centre — a critical proof point for a startup seeking to establish itself as a full-stack space company rather than a payload or component supplier. Attitude control systems, deployment mechanisms, onboard computing, and communications infrastructure were all validated in orbit. These are not trivial achievements: many satellite missions never achieve stable attitude control after deployment, and validating the full operational stack represents meaningful technical progress regardless of the mission's ultimate outcome.
What's Next: Two New OptoSAR Satellites in 24 Months
Far from abandoning the OptoSAR concept, GalaxEye announced on July 7 that it is pressing forward with an accelerated second-generation program. The company plans to launch two new OptoSAR satellites within the next 24 months, incorporating the engineering lessons from Mission Drishti directly into their next-generation spacecraft architecture. Specifically, GalaxEye said it is significantly expanding its in-house capabilities to strengthen quality, reliability and execution — language that suggests the solar storm anomaly has prompted a reassessment of the satellite's radiation hardening and critical system redundancy architecture. CEO Suyash Singh framed the mission's outcome with characteristic resilience: "Mission Drishti marks the culmination of years of innovation, engineering and execution by our team. While the satellite experienced an anomaly following an extreme space weather event, the mission has provided invaluable engineering insights that will directly strengthen our future."