September 2017
Measuring space debris risk
... flat at 500 in any given year in the range. Therefore, we have 10 ‘serious anomaly’ debris strikes on 5,000 available spacecraft overall in this 10-year period. This gives us a ‘ballpark’ serious historical anomaly rate of one in 500 satellites per...
August 2018
Flying to the stars
... needs to have an average velocity of about eight percent of the speed of light. To give an indication of how fast this is, a spacecraft at eight percent of the speed of light would take about 15 seconds to cross the distance between the Earth...
October 2015
Taking AIM with ESA: proposing the first visit to a binary asteroid system
... mass of 800kg – less than a third of Rosetta’s launch mass. Measuring 1.8 x 2.0 x 2.1m across with solar arrays stowed, the spacecraft design is a simple one with fixed solar arrays, a fixed high-gain antenna and a bipropellant propulsion system...
August 2016
Rosetta overcomes major setback
... as a failure by the fault detection and recovery logic. Also the whole swing-by scenario had to be re-designed to establish a spacecraft configuration that would minimise power consumption whilst in the shadow. It was not an easy task but we had...
March 2018
Mapping the dark universe
...several million galaxies will be imaged. Regular observations for instrument calibration and sample characterisation The Euclid spacecraft is equipped with a 1.2 m three-mirror Korsch-type telescope and two instruments, a visible imager, VIS, and the...
July 2018
The rise of interplanetary CubeSats
.... Engineer Joel Steinkraus uses sunlight to test the solar arrays on one of the Mars Cube One (MarCO) spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Interplanetary challenges Interplanetary CubeSats, thanks to their low-cost, could perform highrisk...
