April 2021
Space wars - how they start and how to end them
...brightness signatures down to 18th magnitude. The US space surveillance network, the largest in the world, routinely ‘loses’ satellites all of the time, as the figure on page 63 illustrates. ASATs Although it would seem advisable to limit the ability...
November 2021
Space insurance and the future of risk management
...reach. In February 2020, the company’s Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) docked with the Intelsat 901 communications satellite in order to relocate it to a new position over the Atlantic Ocean. The MEV is designed for a 15-year operational lifetime...
March 2015
JAXA’s challenge to climate change
...difficult to distinguish from the stars. So began the magnificent launch of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) core satellite. The US ambassador to Japan, Ms. Caroline Kennedy, made a special statement before the press, saying that her father...
March 2018
Shifting lines and new horizons in Earth observation markets
... and this model can be very efficient. If EO data become a commodity with huge competition between data and satellite owners, there will be an opportunity for pure content aggregators or data brokers, without investment in proprietary data collection...
April 2018
Transforming the launch market for small spacecraft
...is OneWeb, a company that has contracted with Arianespace to launch a mega-constellation of almost 700 small satellites. The bulk of these satellites are planned to launch as rideshare on the large and well-established Soyuz launch vehicle, for which...
November 2018
Monitoring illegal rainforest deforestation
...That enables specification of optional spectral filters without any significant design changes on the optical system. A constellation of 16 satellites will assure a revisit time shorter than four days to any region of the equatorial belt with spatial...
