ARES Orbital Mosaic Intelligence Array

ARES is an agile CubeSat constellation for Advanced Reconnaissance & Electronic Surveillance we are building for NATO, delivering orbital mosaic intelligence for modern defence operations.

Our Team

Advanced Reconnaissance & Electronic Surveillance Network

Ares Mission overview

ARES is a tactical CubeSat swarm engineered for Advanced Reconnaissance & Electronic Surveillance across contested domains. Operating as a low-footprint, orbital mosaic, it delivers persistent intelligence coverage over borders, maritime corridors, and conflict zones—providing mission-critical data to NATO forces with agility, fault tolerance, and encrypted reliability. Built for rapid deployment and autonomous coordination, ARES redefines how orbital sensing meets modern defence

NATO alignment and operational use cases

ARES is designed to seamlessly integrate with NATO's Federated Mission Networking protocols, enabling rapid fusion of orbital intelligence with allied situational awareness systems. Its operational use spans electronic warfare support, threat geolocation, and critical infrastructure monitoring across NATO’s eastern flank and maritime approaches. By leveraging autonomous asset tasking, encrypted data relays, and agile launch cadence, ARES enhances joint decision-making and tactical superiority in dynamic, multi-domain environments

ARES bolsters NATO’s posture in electromagnetic and contested space environments, deploying low-cost, loss-tolerant assets that thrive where conventional systems falter. By harnessing mesh networking and spectral agility, it ensures continuity of ISR operations amidst jamming, spoofing, or kinetic disruption. ARES functions not only as a tactical edge node—but also as a strategic assurance layer—extending NATO’s eyes and ears deep into denied zones with autonomous, mission-adaptive intelligence

Platform Specifications

Size: 10×10×2.5 cm (0.25U)
Swarm: 125 units
Mass: 365g
Frame: Aluminium 7075-T6, thermal/EMI coated
Control: Passive magnetic stabilisation
Primary: RF & IoT Surveillance Relay
Secondary: Cortex-M7 MCU
Antenna: Quad 437 MHz UHF dipoles
Storage: 1 GB NOR Flash (encrypted)
Downlink: 150 kbps UHF (adaptive)
Orbit: 450–600 km Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO)

Orbital Mosaic Surveillance Architecture

ARES operates as an Orbital Mosaic Surveillance Architecture—a decentralised constellation of tactical CubeSats collaborating across LEO. Unlike traditional monolithic satellites, each node acts as both sensor and signal repeater, collectively forming an adaptive mesh. This architecture enables cross-cueing, real-time retasking, and persistent coverage over high-priority geographies and threat vectors. It transforms ISR from linear passovers into dynamic, event-driven orbital choreography.

Underpinned by autonomous swarm logic and spectral manoeuvrability, the mosaic delivers fault-tolerant intelligence even under electronic attack or asset loss. Its distributed nature allows graceful degradation, reconfiguration, and self-healing—ensuring continuity of surveillance over conflict zones, critical infrastructure, and maritime corridors. With resilience embedded into each orbital strand, ARES becomes more than a sensor array; it’s an intelligent reconnaissance lattice purpose-built for NATO’s evolving operational landscape.

Communications and networking

The CubeSat nodes operate within mesh and token-ring hybrid topologies, balancing throughput with fault tolerance, and ensuring deterministic data flow for time-sensitive ISR payloads. Each node is equipped with multi-band transceivers supporting UHF, S-band, and X-band operations, with optional optical downlinks for high-volume ISR dumps. Ground segment integration uses NATO-standard interfaces via Federated Mission Networking, allowing seamless fusion with theatre C2 and battlefield management systems. Autonomous link establishment algorithms enable burst-mode data exfiltration, opportunistic routing, and in-situ prioritisation—ensuring the most critical packets reach allied decision-makers first. This architecture makes ARES not just a passive observer, but a livewire contributor to NATO’s tactical data economy.

Autonomy and onboard processing

ARES employs a multi-layered autonomy framework driven by edge computing and onboard AI, allowing each CubeSat to act with mission-aware independence. Rather than relying solely on ground control, nodes perform local threat detection, dynamic retasking, and sensor fusion in orbit—minimising latency and ensuring continuous responsiveness in volatile theatres. This autonomy extends to navigational decision-making, spectral allocation, and observation prioritisation, enabling real-time adaptation without external intervention.

At the processing level, ARES nodes integrate FPGA-enhanced compute stacks with dedicated neural modules for pattern recognition, anomaly flagging, and battlefield relevance scoring. This enables onboard triage of high-resolution imagery, EM spectrum data, and telemetry streams, drastically reducing downlink burdens. Data products are compressed, tagged, and synchronised across the swarm using lightweight consensus protocols, supporting a fault-tolerant ISR pipeline that scales gracefully with mission complexity and asset density.

Ground segment and data pipeline

ARES’s ground segment is architected for seamless data ingestion, triage, and fusion across NATO’s tactical and strategic networks. Downlinked intelligence from the CubeSat swarm is received via dispersed ground stations equipped with multi-band transceivers, real-time decryption modules, and mission-priority buffers. These stations interface directly with NATO’s Federated Mission Networking layer, routing processed ISR payloads through a layered data pipeline that supports compression, relevance tagging, and automated dissemination to theatre C2 systems. The pipeline is optimised for low-latency situational awareness, enabling fast-turn battlefield decisions and long-horizon operational planning with confidence and clarity

Security and resilience

ARES is hardened for security at every tier of its architecture—from onboard encryption modules to network-level shielding. Each CubeSat node employs end-to-end cryptography with rotating keys and quantum-safe protocols for uplink and downlink integrity. Communications are cloaked via frequency agility, obfuscation layers, and anomaly detection frameworks that flag spoofing attempts in real time. Physical tamper resistance is baked into satellite casing, and ground infrastructure is compartmentalised to prevent lateral intrusion or metadata leaks across mission segments.

Resilience extends beyond digital defences into operational survivability. ARES maintains swarm-level redundancy, allowing graceful failover if nodes are lost to kinetic strikes, space weather, or jamming. Autonomous re-tasking and orbital reconfiguration preserve coverage continuity, while onboard diagnostics pre-emptively isolate faults for remote patching or deorbiting. Whether facing cyberattack, comms disruption, or hostile tracking, ARES stands ready—not just to endure, but to adapt and outmanoeuvre threats across NATO’s evolving battle space.

Ground Segment & Data Exploitation Workflow

ARES’s ground segment serves as the gateway from orbital observation to actionable insight, harmonising satellite downlinks with NATO’s tactical data ecosystems. ISR payloads are ingested through distributed, multi-band ground stations—each equipped with rapid decrypt modules, adaptive buffering, and mission-priority sorting queues. Once received, data flows through a modular exploitation pipeline that supports compression, triage, and automated relevance scoring before integration with Command and Control systems. This workflow empowers operators to synchronise orbital intelligence with battlefield conditions in near real time, transforming raw sensor data into mission-ready situational awareness.

Defence Resilience & Cyber Hardening Measures

ARES strengthens defence resilience through distributed architecture and mission-aware autonomy, ensuring intelligence continuity even under sustained attack or asset attrition. Its CubeSat swarm design decentralises risk, allowing individual nodes to isolate threats, retask dynamically, and maintain coverage with minimal human input.

Cyber hardening is rooted in a multi-layered security stack spanning hardware, firmware, and network interfaces. Encrypted communications employ quantum-resilient algorithms, supported by rotating credentials and anomaly detection at the packet level. ARES nodes are designed to independently identify spoofing attempts, signal tampering, or telemetry injection, triggering instant containment and forensic flagging. Metadata obfuscation, compartmentalised data access, and zero-trust ground interfaces reduce exposure surfaces across the CubeSat-ground ecosystem—ensuring adversaries face maximal friction at every attempt to disrupt, hijack, or compromise allied orbital ISR capabilities.

Capability Roadmap & Defence Procurement Model

ARES’s capability roadmap embraces iterative evolution aligned with NATO’s modular procurement frameworks. Initial deployments focus on ISR and electronic warfare support, with mid-term upgrades introducing SIGINT clustering, cross-domain data fusion, and manoeuvrable CubeSat variants for space-domain awareness. Long-term, ARES anticipates hybrid orbital–terrestrial integration with UAVs and edge platforms. Procurement is structured around low-unit-cost scalability, rapid launch cadence, and sovereign customisation pathways—allowing defence ministries to tailor payloads, tasking logic, and integration interfaces to local operational doctrines while retaining full NATO interoperability.