February 2019
European system for global weather forecasting and climate change detection
...over the ground station on Spitsbergen, one of the Svalbard islands, as well as McMurdo station in Antarctica. The satellite design is based on a three-axis stabilised configuration, consisting of a service module and a payload module. Its dimensions...
09 October 2019
The first satellite servicing spacecraft launches successfully
... was its payload. Stowed onboard was a pioneering Northrop Grumman-built satellite designed for one purpose - to give ageing spacecraft a new lease of life. The satellite in question is the Mission Extension Vehicle, or MEV 1, and it is the industry...
October 2018
The ethics of space exploration
... not only a heavily instrumented mock-up payload, meant to accurately measure the launch environment, but also two 15 kg satellites, designed and built primarily by undergraduate students. This occurred just one year after the first CubeSats were...
18 December 2019
After delays, ESA’s exoplanet mission launches successfully
... use technologies that have already been tried and tested in space, and driving several aspects of the satellite design. “Both Cheops instrument and spacecraft are built to be extremely stable, so as to measure the incredibly small variations in the...
08 January 2023
GPS
... that “the story of GPS’s origins has been told”. What remains unexplained, in his opinion, is how a system of satellites designed for the US military has “become a part of ordinary citizens’ lives”; I would respectfully suggest that the author...
16 September 2020
The Sun enters a new cycle and will reach a peak in 2025
... meteorologists forecast weather on Earth. To aid in the process NOAA are launching a Space Weather Follow-On (SWFO) satellite designed to make direct, in-situ, measurements of the solar wind thermal plasma and magnetic field “up-stream” of the Earth...
