DUBAI, November 2. /TASS/. Iran has shipped two privately developed satellites to Russia for launch atop a Russian Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket, the news agency Tasnim reported on Saturday.
The satellites Kowsar and Hodhod developed by the Iranian company Space Omid are scheduled for launch on November 5 from Russian territory. The launch will represent the first effort to launch Iranian satellites built by young engineers of the private company whose average age is 25 years, it said.
The Kowsar satellite is intended for the Earth’s remote sensing and satellite imagery. The Hodhod satellite is a telecoms spacecraft designed to improve the quality of data transmission in Iran after its launch.
Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos reported earlier on Saturday that a Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with two Ionosfera-M heliogeophysical spacecraft and 53 small satellites as hosted payloads had been installed at a launch pad of the Vostochny spaceport in the Russian Far East and the liftoff was scheduled for 2:18 a.m. Moscow time on November 5.