YAM-5

YAM-5 (Yet Another Mission 5) is a smallsat operated by Loft Orbital, launched 3 January 2023 on a Falcon 9 Transporter-6 rideshare from Cape Canaveral.^[1] The satellite carries NORAD catalogue number 55076 and orbits in a sun-synchronous orbit at 97.3 degree inclination; published TLE data places the altitude at approximately 455 km by some orbital trackers^[1] and in the 500-600 km range by SatNOGS.^[2]

YAM-5 has an 83 kg bus mass.^[1] The catalogue lists the platform as longbow-bus; Loft Orbital's announcement of YAM-8 identifies YAM-8 as the first mission on the Longbow bus,^[3] while catalogue and community tracking sources place YAM-5 within the pre-Longbow LeoStella ESPA-class series.^[1][2] The specific LeoStella bus variant has not been specified in publicly available documentation as of May 2026.

The satellite carries five hosted payloads. First, a Kineis RF Space Lab: a reconfigurable software-defined RF payload for in-orbit validation of IoT modulation schemes.^[4] Second, the MURI (Multiband Uncooled Radiometer Imager), a two-band longwave infrared radiometric imager operating at 10.8 and 12.0 micrometres with an uncooled focal-plane array, developed by Leonardo DRS with support from NASA Earth Science Technology Office, targeting approximately 1 percent absolute radiometric accuracy.^[5][6] Third, a customer flight computer. Fourth, a sensing payload. Fifth, an experimental S-band transmitter operating in the 2240-2290 MHz and 2400-2483.5 MHz bands.^[7] YAM-5 remained operational as of May 2026.^[2]