Rocket Lab launched an Earth-observing satellite for the Japanese company iQPS early Saturday morning (May 17).
An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site on Saturday at 4:17 a.m. EDT (0817 GMT; 8:17 p.m. local New Zealand time).
Rocket Lab called the mission "The Sea God Sees." That was a reference to the satellite going up, which iQPS nicknamed Wadatsumi-I after a water deity in Japanese mythology.
Wadatsumi-I is a synthetic aperature radar (SAR) satellite, so it will be able to image Earth at all times of day and through cloud cover. The Electron deployed the spacecraft into a 357-mile-high (575-kilometer-high) circular orbit 50.5 minutes after liftoff. The craft then joined iQPS' growing SAR constellation.
"To date, nine QPS-SAR satellites have been launched, and iQPS aims to establish a constellation of 36 satellites," Rocket Lab wrote in the mission's press kit, which you can find here.
"This will enable the delivery of a 'NearReal-Time Data Provisioning Service,' allowing for the observation of specific regions worldwide at an average interval of 10 minutes," the company added. "This will make it possible to collect continuous images as data, and to accumulate data not only on 'Stationary Objects' such as land and buildings, but also on 'Moving Objects' such as vehicles, ships, and cattle and livestock."
"The Sea God Sees" was the sixth mission of 2025 and 64th overall flight for the 59-foot-tall (18-meter-tall) Electron.
It was the third Electron launch for iQPS and the second of eight planned missions across 2025 and 2026 to build out the company's Earth-observing network, according to Rocket Lab.
