By Stephanie Dwilson | 2025-10-31

Three Greek satellites developed with support from the European Space Agency (ESA) will be delivered into space in November, the agency said.

All three CubeSats will launch with the SpaceX Transporter-15 rideshare mission, a program that provides small satellite operators with the opportunity to launch on regularly scheduled Falcon 9 missions for a fee.

Two of the CubeSats are open-source PHASMA mission spacecraft that will monitor the electromagnetic spectrum.

This type of monitoring ensures proper frequency use in telecommunications and satellite operations, protects against signal interference, and can be used to identify and track signals for security purposes.

The third satellite will be used to enhance maritime tracking.

The PHASMA mission is a space-based situational awareness and spectrum monitoring mission with an open-source component developed by the Libre Space Foundation, a Greek-registered nonprofit.

"The PHASMA mission focuses on the design and development of two open-source CubeSats dedicated to monitoring and analyzing the electromagnetic spectrum in space," foundation chairman Manthos Papamatthaiou said.

"Through this project, Libre Space Foundation aims to further develop and promote open-source space technologies, while also reinforcing Greece’s strategic role in the global open-source space ecosystem."

The two PHASMA mission satellites (LAMARR and DIRAC) will fly in close proximity and use artificial intelligence to monitor radio frequency transmissions and identify sources of interference or violations.

Each platform’s GPS location, along with signal artifacts and measurements from their payloads, will be transmitted to the ground for post processing.

The third CubeSat, developed by Prisma Electronics S.A. and dubbed the Maritime Identification and Communication systEm – 1 (MICE-1), is focused on enhancing maritime tracking in the Mediterranean Sea.

According to Prisma Electronics, the satellite’s mission is to help provide reliable connections even in remote areas that typically don’t have satellite coverage.

The goal is to keep communication lines open during natural disasters, even in the maritime "blind spots."

This will essentially serve as an alternative communication channel "leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) devices," Prisma Electronics explains on its website.

IoT connects objects such as appliances and vehicles to the internet through sensors, software and other technologies, enabling them to collect and share data.

Greek investment in space

The satellites are part of a broader mission to reduce Greece’s dependency on foreign satellites for telecommunications and imaging, and represent a step toward more advanced national and regional space domain capabilities.

Four more Greek CubeSat projects are being developed and tested, and are expected to launch in February on SpaceX's Transporter-16.

All seven are part of the "Greece 2.0" National Recovery and Resilience Plan for fundamental economic and social reform that was adopted in 2021.

The first Greek in-orbit demonstration and validation (IOD/IOV) CubeSat launched in June on Transporter-14.

Its mission included capturing visible and near infrared images over sea and land that will help provide information on marine contamination and soil moisture.

"When we decided to invest as a country in space with microsatellites that will provide 24/7 critical data for civil protection, urban planning, and the environment, many considered it science fiction," Greece's Minister of Digital Governance Dimitris Papastergiou told the Athens-Macedonian News Agency.

"However, in collaboration with ESA, we ran all the procedures very quickly, signed the relevant agreements, and within just one year, the first microsatellite will be put into orbit," he said.