12 July 2017
MODIS satellite confirms massive ice shelf rift
NASA’s Aqua MODIS satellite instrument has confirmed that an iceberg... Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) is a key instrument aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites, which scan the entire Earth's surface every one to two days and sometime ...
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...
October 2017
Saving geostationary orbit
... so providing a convenient location from which to relay telephone communications). The first truly geostationary (geosynchronous equatorial orbit) satellite, Syncom 3, was not launched until 1964, but this prime orbital real-estate was soon exploited...
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...
May 2019
Unlocking the full potential of Earth observation
...data, but they wouldn’t be able to offload it all in this narrow window. To make the most of Earth observation satellites, there needs to be a high-speed data connection in space. Flight Engineer Serena Auñón-Chancellor installs the NanoRacks Cubesat...
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...
