Argotec

Argotec is a Turin, Italy-based spacecraft engineering and manufacturing company founded in 2008 specializing in small satellite platforms, deep space CubeSats, and complete mission development for scientific and institutional customers — operating as one of Italy's leading independent small satellite manufacturers with a distinctive capability for deep space missions at CubeSat scale.

Argotec's most celebrated program is LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids), a 6U CubeSat built for the Italian Space Agency (ASI) that launched as a rideshare aboard NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft in November 2021. LICIACube separated from DART approximately 15 days before DART's kinetic impact with Dimorphos (the moonlet of asteroid Didymos) on September 26, 2022, maneuvering into position to observe and image the impact event and resulting ejecta plume from close range — documenting what became the first-ever demonstrated planetary defense technique. The LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) and LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid) cameras captured imagery of the impact plume, crater formation, and Dimorphos's altered trajectory, transmitted back to Earth through the Deep Space Network. LICIACube demonstrated that a small, low-cost CubeSat could execute a technically demanding deep space proximity operations mission in a challenging environment at hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth.

Argotec's satellite platforms include the ArgoMoon CubeSat — an ASI-funded 6U CubeSat that launched on NASA's Artemis I SLS rocket in November 2022 as a secondary payload to photograph SLS separation and monitor Orion spacecraft status — and multiple LEO scientific and Earth observation satellites for ESA and Italian government customers.

The company's engineering capabilities span spacecraft structures, electrical power systems, ADCS, flight software, and mission operations. The deep space experience from LICIACube positions Argotec for future ESA Hera mission (which will fly to the Didymos system to measure DART's effects in detail) secondary payloads and other deep space CubeSat opportunities. Competitors include GomSpace (Denmark), Tyvak/Terran Orbital (US), and other European small satellite manufacturers.