May 2017
India confirms commercial launch intent
... in a time-sequence manner. Once the quadpacks left the rocket, they opened to place the small satellites in orbit. All the 104 satellites were deployed in a 505 km polar Sun-synchronous orbit and, according to B. Jayakumar, mission director, one...
November 2018
Monitoring illegal rainforest deforestation
... occurs at 5.5 km from roads and about 1 km from rivers The proposed operational system will be composed of a constellation of small satellites in low inclination orbits to cover the equatorial belt as illustrated opposite. A constellation...
January 2019
Engineering six-hour solar eclipses with formation flying
... in the mid-1990s (within the Technology, Engineering and Quality Directorate) with the aim of developing small satellites dedicated to technology demonstrations. Up to now, three Proba missions have been successfully launched and operated, starting...
March 2021
iPhone moment for the Earth observation industry
... the price of EO data, geopolitical needs or new technological advancement leading to the availability of a new type of data. Small satellite constellations are on the rise, which will produce more data, but it is plausible that the focus will ...
January 2023
China’s space ambitions fuel defence spending and global innovation
...company, founded in 2016, wants to turn around customer orders to build and launch its small satellites in just six months, and provide Satellite as a Service. Spacety is deploying a unique Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) constellation with both C and...
12 August 2019
Communicating water-powered CubeSats tested in space by NASA
... successfully completed. Collecting data while whizzing round Earth is one thing, but a common challenge when developing small-satellite-borne Earth Observation (EO) missions is getting that data to the ground. Transmitting data via radio frequencies...
