Europe-based global major aerospace group Airbus announced on Monday that the first Inmarsat-6 series telecommunications satellite that it had built had been shipped from Toulouse in France to Tanegashima in Japan, from where it will be launched next month. This is also the first Inmarsat-6 series satellite to be constructed.

Designated I-6 F1, the satellite will be launched on a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA launch rocket. The Inmarsat-6 is based on Airbus’ Eurostar E3000 satellite design, which has established a record of great reliability. The I-6 F1 will be the 54th Eurostar E3000 put into space, and will also be the fifth such satellite to be fitted with an electric propulsion system for orbital manoeuvring, including increasing orbital altitude.

“Inmarsat-6 F1 features one of the most sophisticated digitally processed payloads we have ever built and delivers remarkable flexibility, capability and capacity,” highlighted Airbus Telecom Systems head François Gaullier. “As a long-serving supplier to Inmarsat, having built the Inmarsat-4 and Alphasat satellites, Airbus is proud to continue helping keep Inmarsat at the top of the game with this step-change in capability brought by Inmarsat-6.”

The use of electric propulsion, in which Airbus is a world leader, reduces mass, thereby allowing the I-6 F1 to carry two payloads, one in the L-radio frequency band and the other in the Ka-band. The satellite carries a 9 m aperture L-band antenna and nine multibeam Ka-band antennas. “The new generation modular digital processor provides full routing flexibility over up to 8 000 channels and dynamic power allocation to more than 200 spot beams in L-band,” reported Airbus. “Ka-band spot beams will be steerable over the full Earth disk, with flexible channel to beam allocation.”

Consequently, the new satellite will allow Inmarsat (a UK-based global satellite telecommunications company) to provide more advanced services in the L-band. These will include very low cost mobile communications and Internet of Things services, for customers with mobile platforms, whether at sea, on land or in the air. The Ka-band payload will strengthen the company’s global high-speed broadband service.

I-6 F1 has a launch mass of 5.5 t, embarked power of 21 kW and a designed life of more than 15 years. In developing the platform and payload technologies for the new series of Inmarsat satellites, Airbus had the support of the European Space Agency and several national space agencies. Prominent among the latter were the UK Space Agency and CNES (the French space agency).