Tag: Satellite

Virgin Galactic wants to bring internet to have-nots

Posted on January 16, 2015 by - News

 article-2546173-1AF57AF200000578-172_634x417Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson announced plans to launch as many as 2,400 micro satellites in an effort to set up a constellation capable of bringing broadband communications to millions of people who do not have it.

Beardie said he plans to launch a low-earth-orbit satellite constellation of 648 satellites to get the project rolling. The internet will be available through a company called OneWeb.

OneWeb is backed by Qualcomm for this planned world-wide Internet service. OneWeb said it plans to work with local partners to provide access. OneWeb terminals act as small cells with the ability to provide access to the surrounding area via a WiFi, LTE, 3G or 2G connection using an operator partner’s licensed spectrum, or only LTE or WiFi on unlicensed spectrum.

Writing in his bog, Beardie said that Virgin is working to build a two-stage rocket, known as LauncherOne that would air-launch launch from the company’s existing WhiteKnightTwo aircraft at about 45,000 to 50,000ft.

WhiteKnightTwo was part of the Virgin Galactic’s space tourism venture which had a major setback in October when the spaceship it launched crashed killing one pilot and injuring the other. However, this one uses a different launcher technology.

LauncherOne will be built using advanced composite structures, and powered by a new family of LOX/RP-1 liquid rocket engines. Each LauncherOne mission will be capable of delivering as much as 225 kilograms (500 pounds) to a low inclination Low Earth Orbit or 120 kilograms (265 pounds) to a high-altitude Sun-Synchronous Orbit, for a price of less than $10M, Beardie wrote.

He said that this was a very efficient way of getting satellites into space. Virgin can take off every three or four hours.

The first batch of satellites will cost around $2 billion which will be very competitive on price, as far as the end-user is concerned.

“We believe that the break-even of this is not enormous. We feel it makes sense economically as well.”

 

 

Software errors cause Euro GPS to get lost

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

gallioEurope’s global positioning satellite project is not off to a good start after software was blamed for placing the satellites in the wrong orbit.

It does not bode well when a software project which is supposed to help Europeans find themselves to within 10 feet, can’t place its own satellites in the correct orbit, but that is exactly what has happened.

To be fair, the problem was not with the European Union’s Galileo satellites but  software errors in the Fregat-MT rocket’s upper-stage.

According to a Russian newspaper Izvestia a nonstandard operation of the integrated management system was likely caused by an error in the embedded software. As a result, the upper stage received an incorrect flight assignment, and, operating in full accordance with the embedded software, it has delivered the units to the wrong destination.

Both the upper-stage and the software for it were developed by a Moscow-based government-owned corporation, the Academician Pilyugin Scientific-production Centre of Automatics and Instrument-Making, or the Academician Pilyugin Centre.

The Arianespace satellite launch company, the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos are currently investigating the incident.  It just seems a pity that the Europeans did not have a rival to the Russian or American mapping systems.

 

McDonald’s takes control of lost satellite

Posted on August 12, 2014 by - News

mcdonaldsAn independent team of boffins, working from an abandoned McDonalds, is taking control of a a NASA satellite and running a crowdfunded mission. The entire project uses old radio parts from eBay and a salvaged flat screen TV.

The ISEE-3 is a disco-era satellite that used to measure space weather like solar wind and radiation, but went out of commission decades ago.

Now, a small team led by a former NASA employee Keith Cowing,  has taken control of the satellite with NASA’s blessing.

The satellite’s battery has been dead for over 20 years, but it had solar panels to power 98 percent of the satellite’s full capabilities. When it was working it ran missions around the Moon and Earth, and flew through the tail of a comet.

Everyone knew it would come back in 2014, but NASA was not sure it was a project worth rescuing.

Since the satellite went offline, the team had retired, the documentation was lost and the equipment became outdated.

A crowdfunding campaign raised $160,000 to get the satellite back into service.

At the outset of the crowdfunding campaign, they brought the idea to NASA, but there was no precedent on which to base an agreement. No external organization has ever taken command of a spacecraft, but NASA didn’t want to say no, so they asked the team if they needed any help.

Their new control centre, has been dubbed “McMoon’s.” For their console, they pulled a broken flatscreen TV from a government dumpster and fixed the power supply. The other pieces are from eBay, including a Mac laptop and some radio parts.

With just those bare-bones pieces, they were able to MacGyver a computer-radio hybrid that made contact with the ISEE-3.

Once they were able to communicate with the satellite, they established a new orbit around the Sun, slightly larger than the Earth’s orbit. This will allow more testing. It will be providing solar weather data and then open sourcing it.

Google has been helping the team build a site that will open up the data to the world. Everything coming from the satellite will be available in different formats and packages so that anyone can get it.