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Category: satellites – Page 60

“The project has certainly been a rewarding exercise in bringing art and science together.”

The magnetic signals from the ESA’s Swarm satellite project were turned into sound by researchers at the Technical University of Denmark. The outcome is quite thrilling for something that is supposed to protect us.

“The team used data from ESA’s Swarm satellites and other sources and used these magnetic signals to manipulate and control a sonic representation of the core field. The project has certainly been a rewarding exercise in bringing art and science together,” musician and project supporter Klaus Nielsen, from the Technical University of Denmark, explained the project in the ESA’s release. team used data from ESA’s Swarm satellites and other sources and used these magnetic signals to manipulate and control a sonic representation of the core field. The project has certainly been a rewarding exercise in bringing art and science together,” musician and project supporter Klaus Nielsen, from the Technical University of Denmark, explained the project in the ESA’s release.

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Put horror movies and games aside for a few minutes to listen to something truly unsettling this Halloween season. The has released audio of what our planet’s magnetic field sounds like. While it protects us from cosmic radiation and charged particles from solar winds, it turns out that the magnetic field has an unnerving rumble.

You can’t exactly point a microphone at the sky and hear the magnetic field (nor can we see it). Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark collected by the ESA’s three Swarm satellites into sound, representing both the magnetic field and a solar storm.

The ethereal audio reminds me of wooden wind chimes rattling as a mass of land shifts, perhaps during an earthquake. It brings to mind the cracking sounds of a moving glacier as well. You might get something different out of the five-minute clip.

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SpaceX has rolled out an upgraded version of its Rideshare program that will allow even more small satellite operators to send their spacecraft to orbit for extremely low prices.

SpaceX threw its hat into the growing ring of smallsat launch aggregators in August 2019 with its Smallsat Program. Initially, the company offered a tiered pricing scale with multiple rates for the different sizes of ports a satellite operator could attach their spacecraft to. For customers purchasing their launch services more than 12 months in advance, SpaceX aimed to charge a minimum of $2.25 million for up to 150 kilograms (~330 lb) and a flat $15,000 for each additional kilogram. Customers placing their order 6–12 months before launch would pay a 33% premium ($20,000/kg).

SpaceX may have sorely misjudged the market, however, because the company introduced a simpler, reworked pricing system just a few months later. SpaceX slashed prices threefold, removed most of the tier system, and added a portal that allowed customers to easily reserve launch services online. Compared to the first attempt, the new pricing – $1 million for up to 200 kilograms (~440 lb) and $5000 for each extra kilogram – was extraordinarily competitive and effectively solidified SpaceX as the premier source of rideshare launch services overnight. Save for an inflation-spurred increase to $1.1 million and $5500/kg, that pricing has remained stable for almost three years, and SpaceX’s Smallsat Program has become a spectacular success.

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Advancing Space For Humanity — Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Ph.D. — Assistant Director for Space Policy, Office of Science and Technology Policy, The White House.

Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Ph.D. is Assistant Director for Space Policy, Office of Science and Technology Policy, at the White House (https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/) where she focuses on determining civil and commercial space priorities for the President’s science advisor, and her portfolio includes a wide range of disciplines including Orbital Debris, On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM), Earth Observations, Space Weather, and Planetary Protection.

Previously, Dr. Uzo-Okoro built and managed over 60 spacecraft missions and programs in 17 years at NASA, in roles as an engineer, technical expert, manager and executive, in earth observations, planetary science, heliophysics, astrophysics, human exploration, and space communications, which represented $9.2B in total program value. Her last role was as a NASA Heliophysics program executive.

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Thanks in large part to delays suffered by Arianespace’s next-generation Ariane 6 rocket, a small fleet of European satellites are simultaneously converging on the United States to hitch rides into orbit with SpaceX.

SpaceX launching European payloads is nothing new. The company has occasionally launched spacecraft built in Europe for European space agencies or companies, but the combination is exceedingly rare. For several reasons, however, what was once alien is beginning to become commonplace, and that fact is about to be made even clearer over the remainder of 2022.

SpaceX kicked off a string of six or seven launches of spacecraft built by or for Europe on October 15th. Over the weekend, the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket – 70 meters (230 ft) tall, 3.7 meters (12 ft) wide, and capable of producing up to 770 tons (1.7M lbf) of thrust at liftoff – successfully launched the Hotbird 13F communications satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) for the French satcom company Eutelsat.

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This week, in-space refueling company Orbit Fab won a $13.3 million USSF contract to gas up geostationary (GEO) military satellites starting in 2025. Under the four-year contract, which was first reported by Bloomberg, the Colorado-based space startup will deliver hydrazine propellant to at least one Space Force satellite in GEO.

If you build it, they will come

Jeremy Schiel, cofounder and chief development officer of Orbit Fab, says he expects the Defense Department’s buy-in to boost the company’s credibility on the commercial market.

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Astronomers just detected what may be the most powerful flash of light ever seen.

The so-called gamma-ray burst, the most energetic type of electromagnetic explosion known to exist in the universe, was first spotted by telescopes Sunday (Oct. 9).

Gamma-ray bursts, which were discovered accidentally by U.S. military satellites in the 1960s, are likely produced when giant stars explode at the ends of their lives before collapsing into black holes, or when ultradense stellar remnants known as neutron stars collide. Within seconds, these explosions unleash as much energy as the sun will emit during its entire 10-billion-year lifetime.

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