August 2018
Earth observation game-changer
...kind of reliability Work on a prototype satellite design was started in the autumn of 2012 and finished in early 2015. Its first prototype satellite was built in-house, while the company’s second satellite is being designed by ICEYE but assembled and...
April 2020
Replacing hydrazine fuel with a greener alternative
... find a replacement. Anyone watching hydrazine being put into a satellite would think they were watching a scene from Steven Spielberg’s...gaining them. Propulsion systems are leading the drive of satellite design, but it’s the payload that pays. As the...
June 2022
Finnish start-up ReOrbit aims to revolutionise space industry
...editor for C4ISRNET, wrote in an article in 2020 mentioning “even the Pentagon wanting help for its satellites to talk to one another”. If satellite designs were developed with a software-first approach, where they were autonomous, reconfigurable and...
March 2015
On-orbit satellite servicing, insurance and lessons of Palapa B2 and Westar 6
...in itself will be challenging given that commercial communication satellites are currently not built with servicing in mind. Cost-conscious satellite manufacturers with mature satellite designs are naturally reluctant to add features that they expect...
March 2015
Ka-band satellite communication and lowering the price of VSATs
...Mhz, 5 times that allocated for C-band and Ku-band. At the same time, satellite designers had another breakthrough. They created the High Throughput Satellite (HTS) based on ultra-precise antenna calculations and projections. Instead of pointing just...
October 2015
Down to Earth: how to deorbit satellites and save money
... calculate the residual propellant. The margin of error is often higher than 15% These factors have an impact on satellite design. To avoid redesigning, debris mitigation countermeasures would have to take into account projections for orbital debris...
