South West England from the 25th July 2014. Landsat 8 imagery courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and U.S. Geological Survey
In the week that the leaders of the G7 and the Queen passed our door on their way to Cornwall, the UK Government offered support for the first satellite to be designed, built and launched in Cornwall!
Kernow Sat 1 will be an Earth Observation (EO) satellite designed with the University of Exeter, which will undertake research to determine what requirements would best support monitoring the health of Cornwall’s coast and marine economy. The name comes from Cornwall – Kernow – in the Cornish language and the cubeSat will be built in collaboration with Oregon State University’s Open Source CubeSat and KISPE Space. It is hoped that Kernow Sat 1 will be the first satellite launched from Spaceport Cornwall next year via Virgin Orbit’s rocket. It is a really exciting project for the South West space industry!
Also hoping to launch EO satellites in 2022, is Egypt who announced that their intentions for Nexast-1 and EgyptSat-2 to go into orbit. Nexast-1 will be a microsatellite focused on remote sensing and scientific research, whilst EgyptSat-2 will be a bigger satellite carrying optical instruments with an anticipated spatial resolution of less than two metres.
The final future launch news of the week came from the Philippine Space Agency who announced its intention to launch the Multispectral Unit for Land Assessment (MULA) satellite in 2023. This will be the Philippine’s largest satellite and is being designed and built with UK company Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. It will have an optical camera with nine spectral bands with a spatial resolution of 5 m and a swath width of 120 km, enabling it to image 100,000 square kilometres of land every day. The data will be used for disaster management, land use and land cover change mapping, crop monitoring, and forestry management. The satellite will also have an Automatic Identification System and an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, for ship and aircraft tracking.
Away from future launches to those satellites already in space; it was announced that by ESA that the ICEYE mission has formally become a Third Party Mission within the ESA Earthnet programme. This means that the X-band Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) data in VV polarization, with sub-metre spatial resolution, from the constellation of 10 satellites will be available to eligible researchers and EO application developers.
Finally this week, the German Space Agency (DLR) issued a new fun four-minute animation called ‘A Day Without Space’ which can be found here, it details all the elements of modern life which are dependent on space and what would not happen without it. From communications, through navigation and weather forecasts, to financial transactions and much more, the animation wonders how the world would cope without all of these facilities. Not sure we agree with all of the conclusions in the animation, but it does nicely demonstrate how dependent we are on space-based technology!
