While it might sound like an easy question to know: what time is it on the Moon? It is far more difficult to answer than you might think. On Earth, the planet is divided into twenty-four world time zones based … Continue reading
This week has seen two launches from some of the workhorses of the satellite industry, namely one of China’s Long March rockets and Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket; however, the outcomes of the launches were very different, demonstrating how difficult the … Continue reading
Last month, the United States’ Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the launch of a new satellite. However, this approval has provoked discussion and controversy within the space sector. The approval is for the Earendil 1 satellite, for the American company … Continue reading
This week has seen the release of the first publicly available batches of Earth Observation (EO) data from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, and a commercial rocket from China launching 9 satellites including several EO payloads. NISAR Data … Continue reading
Two interesting developments from India over the last week, looking at the first successful commercial rocket launch showing how the country’s private sector is getting involved in space and secondly reports showing the potential impact of this. India’s First Commercial … Continue reading
We regularly blog about the number of satellites in orbit around the Earth, and how much this has increased over the years. Our 2025 version described that around 15,000 satellites were in orbit from the almost 21,000 objects that had … Continue reading
Tuesday 7th July saw the latest SpaceX rideshare mission, Transporter-17, take off when a Falcon 9 rocket took over 80 satellite payloads into orbit from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base. As usual with these rideshare missions, there were several Earth … Continue reading
Highlighting two contrasting approaches to satellite sovereignty within the Earth Observation (EO) sector this week, starting with news on the demise of Sentinel-1A and then moving onto interesting reports from Russia. Sentinel-1A Following last week’s blog about the contract for … Continue reading
One of the key benefits of Earth Observation (EO) is the principle of data continuity – this is having uninterrupted, consistent, long-term datasets available over large areas. This is critical for a variety of reasons, such as understanding what is … Continue reading
Last week was spent surrounded by the dreaming spires of Oxford, at the EarthCARE Science and Validation workshop. The EarthCARE (Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer) satellite, nicknamed HakuryĹ« (Japanese for “white dragon”), is an amazing European Space Agency/Japanese Space … Continue reading
