March 2017
Twinkle - a mission to unravel the story of planets in our galaxy
... from its target planetary systems using a modified telescope system developed by STFC’s RAL Space Facility for Earth observation missions. Behind a 50cm-class primary mirror, a series of small mirrors will fold the light to fit the...
April 2017
Mega-challenges for mega-constellations
... manoeuvres and the fact that most of these missions occur in low altitude orbits (e.g. Cosmos-type Earth observation satellites). The operating altitudes now selected by most of the megaconstellations correspond to quasieternal orbital lifetimes...
November 2018
Pole star rising
... Copernicus) and from national resources. One such resource should be a national Earth observation system, capable of conducting both visible and infrared and radar observations. The National Space Programme (NSP), performed in the execution of the...
April 2020
Satellite mega-constellations pose threat to ground-based astronomy
..., distributed among a series of orbits in order to cover the planet in a close to optimum way; their applications include Earth observation, global positioning and one or two-way communication services. Several such constellations already exist, the...
October 2020
Pandemic impacts - the state of the ground segment
.... Both physical and virtual assets must be addressed. Data in transit (e.g. command and control communications, Earth observation data and live monitoring information) as well as data at rest (e.g. satellite information databases, data in storage...
October 2021
Russia and China – a new space axis
...that it would fly in polar orbit so as to maximise Earth observations (amateur space watchers in northern latitudes were delighted to hear ...of space available for human-supervised experiments in low Earth orbit doubled at a stroke. Nine projects were...
