Military/Aerospace Electronics

STEM education projects, and support for international science partnerships, will receive a £6.6 million funding boost, the UK Space Agency (UKSA) has announced. The announcement was made at the start of the Space Comm-Expo in Farnborough, which is one of the UK’s largest space events. Beneficiaries will include space and science student projects, UK researchers working to design magnetometers for ...

Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) – the Bavarian rocket startup which will be launching from the Shetland Islands – has successfully hot fired its upper stage for a full duration test, it reports. It says this marks the completion of an Integrated System Test (IST) campaign in which a staged-combustion Helix engine was integrated into an upper stage tank system and ...

The latest addition to the UK’s Satellite Applications Catapult’s network of Space Enterprise Labs has opened at the Compound Semiconductor Applications (CSA) Catapult in Newport, South Wales. Services at the Space Enterprise Lab (SEL) will include support for virtual meetings, business sprints, user engagement sessions, virtual whiteboards and built-in video conferencing. They will be available for use by everyone within ...

iSH, the Industrial Solutions Hub, is hosting a Space Week series of events across West Cumbria from 26-30 June. The organisation says businesses, schools and individuals are invited to a range of space-related events throughout the last week of the month to see how they could be inspired by the UK’s space sector. The first two days of the event ...

Satellite Vu has raised a further £12.7m in Series A-2 funding, bringing its investment total to £30.5m. The UK thermal infrared satellite firm says the A2 round was led by Molten Ventures, with participation from Seraphim Space Investment Trust PLC, A/O Proptech, Lockheed Martin, Ridgeline Ventures, Earth Sciences Foundation, and Stellar Ventures. All are existing investors. The company said the ...

The UK government has announced £50 million of funding – the Space Clusters and Infrastructure Fund (SCIF) – to support research and development with a focus on building the UK’s space infrastructure. Basically, SCIF aims to help build or upgrade R&D facilities and equipment that can bring high value space technologies to market. Specifically, it will award match funding to ...

Iceye, the Finnish satellite imagery specialist, has introduced a new imaging mode, dubbed “Dwell”, for its synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) small satellites. It’s a commercial system aimed at users who need to extract more information from radar imagery, including movement and direction of man-made objects, for example vehicles. It enables the radar imaging satellites to focus on a single point on ...

The UK has hosted the first AUKUS AI and autonomy trial, with the aim of driving artificial intelligence into military use. Service personnel, scientists and engineers from the three AUKUS nations (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) combined for the exercise taking place on the Salisbury Plains. It saw “AI-enabled assets” involved in a collaborative swarm to detect and track military ...

Viasat can finally complete its acquisition of Inmarsat, following the announcement that the European Commission (EC) has unconditionally approved Viasat’s acquisition of Inmarsat. Regulatory approval has already been forthcoming from the UK and the US. The U.K. Competition & Markets Authority gave clearance on 9 May 2023 and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on 19 May 2023. The two companies ...

An Imperial College prototype quantum accelerometer has been tested on a Royal Navy ship. The accelerometer uses ultra-cold atoms, whose wave-like properties allow them to be measured accurately by lasers as they move under acceleration. Quantum accelerometers and gyros are of enormous interest for inertial navigation systems as the quantum nature of the parameters measured have the potential to offer ...