SACHEON, South Korea, Oct. 15, 2026 - The five NEONSAT microsatellites launched on South Korea's Nuri rocket transmitted their first images 14 hours and 29 minutes after launch, the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) said on 15 October.^[1] KASA said all of them have stable communications, normal power generation and working attitude control.^[2] The satellites lifted off on 7 October aboard Nuri from the Naro Space Center in Goheung.^[3] The rocket carried 15 satellites, a national record that beat the 13 flown on Nuri's fourth launch in November 2025.^[4] It placed 14 of them in their target orbits, the five NEONSAT satellites and nine CubeSats.^[5][6] The fifteenth, the CubeSat PERSAT02, failed to separate and stayed on the rocket.^[7][8] The flight raised Nuri's cumulative launch success rate to 80 percent.^[9] The full NEONSAT constellation will have 10 satellites, with the remaining five due on Nuri's sixth flight,^[10] planned for the second half of 2027.^[11] Impact Insight. Constellations of small Earth-observation satellites trade size for numbers: several craft in coordinated orbits can revisit the same place many times a day. The link to planetary defense is indirect: it shows a growing national launch capability, and each new constellation adds objects to the low-orbit traffic that tracking networks must follow.