GMV celebrates the success of the launch of the Miura 1

On Saturday, October 7 at 02:19 CET (00:19 UTC), the launch of the PLD Space Miura 1 rocket was successfully completed, from the facilities of the El Arenosillo Experimentation Center (CEDEA), belonging to the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA).

The final objective of this first launch has been to carry out a flight test that would allow the technologies developed so far to be validated in real conditions, and in particular propulsion and avionics.

Specifically, the flight lasted 306 seconds, during which Miura 1 reached an apogee of 46 kilometers high. The mission concluded with the splashdown of the launcher in the Atlantic Ocean and its probable recovery, the latter not yet formally confirmed by PLD Space.

According to the first information available, everything seems to indicate that the performance of all the vehicle's subsystems was nominal, without any significant deviation or degradation from the predefined trajectory. This includes the avionics system, developed by GMV.

Since 2017 GMV has been working on the design, development and end-to-end qualification of the complete avionics system for the Miura 1 suborbital rocket. This system includes all the systems that make up the avionics of a launcher: the power subsystem (from the energy storage to power distribution); the data management subsystem (in charge of executing the mission timeline, but also collecting data from sensors, activating valves and sending telemetry data); the guidance, navigation and control (GNC) subsystem, based on COTS sensors and actuators; the onboard software, the management of payloads in microgravity and wiring (harness).

Within the framework of this activity, GMV has also begun to develop technologies for autonomous localization and the in-flight termination system.

Last Saturday's flight represents the culmination of a long, challenging but extremely interesting journey, with many results and lessons learned achieved with perseverance and commitment assumed by many parts of GMV.

This success has once again demonstrated GMV's strong capabilities in GNC, critical SW, flight HW design, testing, integration and full end-to-end validation.

GMV's avionics suite for micro-launchers has thus reached a level of maturity that very few companies in the sector have at this time.