On Sunday, 28 January, Iran simultaneously sent three domestically designed satellites into space for the first time in its space history, Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) reported.

The satellites were put into an elliptical orbit with a minimum altitude of 450 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, ISNA announced. The satellites included one Mehda communication and research satellite and two nano-satellites, Keyhan-2 and Hatef-1. They were launched by an in-house developed Simorgh carrier rocket from the central province of Semnan.

The main objective of Mehda was to evaluate the performance of the Simorgh vehicle in performing multiple tasks. The report said that other two vehicles would deal with global positioning and communication technologies.

On 20 January, Iran announced the launch of a domestic lightweight 47-kilogram research and telecommunications satellite called Soraya, using a domestic three-stage solid-fueled Qaem-100 carrier rocket. This is reported by China Daily, a partner of TV BRICS.

Iran joined the BRICS grouping on 1 January 2024. This year the group is chaired by Russia.

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