Tuesday saw the launch of the Iranian satellite Khayyam by a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan.
The Iranian satellite bears the name of an 11th- and 12th-century Persian scientist by the name of Omar Khayyam.
Iran has stated that no other country will have access to the information it receives due to its encrypted algorithm, despite claims that Russia may use it to spy on Ukraine throughout its military action there.
Russian space commander Yury Borisov praised the satellite launch as ‘a significant milestone in Russian-Iranian bilateral cooperation’ and said it ‘will open the road to the implementation of future and even larger projects.’
The satellite, which will remain fully under Iran’s control, has been fitted with a high-resolution camera that will be used for environmental monitoring.
Iran’s Minister of Telecommunications Issa Zarepour referred to the occasion as ‘historic,’ calling it ‘a turning moment for the start of a new relationship between our two countries in the sphere of space.’
According to the Iran Space Agency (ISA), it has obtained ‘initial telemetric data’ from the satellite, enabling Iran to keep tabs on its arch-enemy Israel and other Middle Eastern nations.
It comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran last month during one of his few excursions abroad following Moscow’s invasion on February 24.
Russia has previously launched an Iranian satellite into orbit, doing so in 2005 with the deployment of Tehran’s Sina-1 satellite from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in Moscow.
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