Military/Aerospace Electronics

Alongside NASA’s Cygnus cargo pod, dozens of CubeSats were destroyed in the Antares rocket launch failure. Among them were 26 Dove earth-observation CubeSats from Planet Labs, known as Flock-1d “Space is hard and our hearts go out to our fellow space innovators on that launch,” said the firm. “Our approach to mitigate risks is to deploy our fleets of satellites ...

China is planning to launch an uncrewed spacecraft on a quick jaunt around the moon, in a test of technology designed to return rocks from the lunar surface to Earth. The Chang’e 5-T1 mission is set to blast off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan, China, on 23 October. It will fly around the back of the moon ...

When the Rosetta spacecraft sends its lander to the surface of a comet on 12 November, the lander will follow pre-arranged orders from Earth to touch down safely and send data home for analysis. But future spacecraft may be able to do it all on their own. Kiri Wagstaff and her colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have developed software ...

Tiny, cheap CubeSats are becoming an increasing danger in space. The mini-satellites could cause catastrophic collisions with larger craft, threatening to produce orbiting blizzards of space debris like those in the movie Gravity. CubeSats measure just 10 centimetres on a side and weigh a maximum of 1.3 kilograms. The satellites can easily launch on multiple types of rockets or from the International ...

Two European Space Agency navigation satellites launched into the wrong orbit last weekend. The satellites were meant to be the fifth and sixth in Europe’s Galileo global positioning system, a network of 30 satellites expected to be up and running by 2020. They launched from French Guinea on a Soyuz rocket on 22 August, but did not make it to ...

Gresham Power Electronics of Wiltshire has secured a £1.18m order from Korea based Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering (DSME) to supply un-interruptable power supply (UPS) systems for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s Tide class tankers, currently being built by Daewoo. To be delivered to the MoD, each tanker requires eight UPS systems of various power ratings. “After nine months of hard ...

Four more O3B satellites have been launched, to help provide telco services in emerging markets.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved plans for the Athena X-ray space telescope, which will be the largest of its kind ever built. Costing about €1 billion, the flagship project will launch in 2028. It will weigh in at 5 tonnes, be about 12 metres long and will provide 100 times greater sensitivity than existing X-ray missions. The telescope will ...

NASA and the National Space Grant Foundation have selected five universities to design systems, concepts and technologies to enhance capabilities for deep space missions. They are part of the 2015 Exploration Habitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge. The idea is to encourage studies in spaceflight-related disciplines, and also to help the agency gather new ideas to complement its current R&D. Throughout ...