December 2014
India joins the major league with the Mars Orbiter Mission
In the pre-dawn hours of 24 September 2014, there was hectic activity coupled with an air of excitement and nervous apprehension in the ...
March 2015
On-orbit satellite servicing, insurance and lessons of Palapa B2 and Westar 6
... leaks have occurred on Chinasat 6A and Eutelsat W3B. Notable issues during deployments have affected Intelsat New Dawn, Telstar 14R, Intelsat 19 and Amazonas 4A. Some of these satellites were almost certainly missed opportunities for on-orbit...
October 2015
Taking AIM with ESA: proposing the first visit to a binary asteroid system
... implications – offering a window back to the very earliest microscopic-scale processes of accretion right back to the dawn of this and indeed other Solar Systems. Finally, AIDA is the opportunity to materialize international technical, political and...
October 2015
Copernicus, ESA’s most ambitious Earth Observation programme
... and provide much-needed information to improve weather forecasting. ADA-Aeolus will orbit in a Sun-synchronous, dusk/dawn orbit at 408 km and employ a highly sophisticated Doppler wind lidar with a large telescope that collects light...
October 2015
Baikonur, Kibo and beyond: Japan’s leading role in space
... at night. And it’s not just asteroids: Japan is conducting planetary exploration too. Currently, the Akatsuki (‘Dawn’) probe is on its space odyssey - in late July, it successfully conducted orbit adjustment in an attempt to place it in orbit...
March 2016
Why We Need Space Artists
... my own career overlapped the last two, starting as I did around 1950. A few years later saw the dawn of the Space Age, with the launch of Sputnik 1, and we began to see the work of Second Generation artists...
