MANTIS, the first satellite mission to be supported from concept to liftoff by ESA’s Earth Observation InCubed programme, has been launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. MANTIS carries a high-resolution multispectral camera coupled with a powerful AI processing unit.

Intuition-1 was also launched on the same rocket and will similarly demonstrate the advantages of onboard AI capabilities, in this case in tandem with a hyperspectral imager. The satellite’s machine learning algorithms were developed under the ESA-funded Genesis project