cross pond high tech

Exotrail, a French company dedicated to providing innovative on-orbit transportation solutions for the small satellite market have announced today that they have signed a contract with AAC Clyde Space, Europe’s leading nanosatellite solutions specialist. Exotrail will equip them with cutting-edge propulsion solutions for their customer, the global satellite telecommunications leader Eutelsat, for its ELO 3 and ELO 4 spacecrafts. The French company will provide propulsion systems for the two 6U CubeSats which will be manufactured and delivered to orbit by AAC Clyde Space. The Eutelsat mission is a precursor to a potential constellation called ELO (Eutelsat LEO for Objects).  The contract is to be delivered before the end of the year, both satellites will be launched in 2021.

AAC Clyde Space CEO Luis Gomes said:

“We are very much looking forward to working with Exotrail.  Their product is a perfect fit for both our needs and our customer’s requirements. Their modular ExoMG™ product has a highly compact and flexible form factor with industry leading performance levels, in particular with respect to thrust levels”

David Henri, Co-founder and CEO of Exotrail added:

“AAC Clyde Space is an established specialist in advanced nanosatellite spacecraft missions and provides market-leading New Space solutions. We are delighted to be able to assist them for this mission with our ExoMG™ - nano.  This underlines the relevance of our solutions for optimising global constellations and our expertise in this growing sector”

 

Exotrail started its propulsion system development with a flight demonstrator project that was designed, built, qualified and delivered in only 10 months. The launch of the flight system demonstrator, initially scheduled to fly in November 2019 on board a PSLV, is now planned in March 2020 (due to launcher delay). And the resulting heritage acquired with this project, along with the expertise and innovation put forward in Exotrail’s product development, has allowed the company to secure its first customers.  These customer contracts demonstrate that Exotrail’s strategy is paying off and that the company has moved quickly from vision to reality. A vision to not only provide a propulsion system, but a set of software, hardware and services, to change the way satellites are being launched and operated on orbit. This vision is now translating into revenue and success.

 

More than 100 cracker-size miniprobes successfully phoned home in March, one day after deploying from their carrier spacecraft in Earth orbit, mission team members announced today (June 3).

ON AUGUST 24th 2001 the Parkes Observatory, in Australia, picked up an unusual signal. It was a burst of radio waves coming more or less from the direction of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a miniature galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. This burst was as brief as it was potent. It lasted less than 5 milliseconds but, during that period, shone with the power of 100m suns. It was, though, noticed by astronomers only in 2007, when they were poking around in Parkes’s archived data. As far as they can tell, it has never been repeated.Similar unrepeated signals have since been noted elsewhere in the heavens. So far, 17 such “fast radio bursts” (FRBs) have been recognised. They do not look like anything observed before, and there is much speculation about what causes them. One possibility is magnetars—highly magnetised, fast-rotating superdense stars. Another is a particularly exotic sort of black hole, formed when the centrifugal force of a rotating, superdense star proves no longer adequate to the task of stopping that star collapsing suddenly under its own gravity. But, as Manasvi Lingam of Harvard University and Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics observe, there is at least one further possibility: alien spaceships.Specifically, the two researchers suggest, in a paper to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, that FRBs might be generated by giant radio transmitters designed to push such spaceships around. With the rotation of the galaxies in which these transmitters are located, the transmitter-beams sweep across the heavens. Occasionally, one washes over Earth, producing an FRB.This idea is not completely mad. Human rocket scientists have toyed with something similar, in order to overcome one of the biggest problems of spaceship design: that a craft propelled by a rocket motor must carry its fuel with it. Fuel has mass. That mass must be moved by more fuel—which adds more mass to the craft, which thus needs still more fuel. And so on. For this reason, 90% or more of a conventional rocket’s launch mass is its fuel.It is possible, though, to separate the fuel from the craft. That is the principle behind a solar sail, which employs the gentle pressure exerted by sunlight to propel a vehicle. A nippier alternative is to use focused light beams to provide the pressure. Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire with a long-standing interest in science, is paying for research into such a machine. He proposes to drive a tiny probe to Alpha Centauri, one of Earth’s nearest stellar neighbours, using banks of powerful lasers.Dr Lingam and Dr Loeb suggest FRBs might be the result of vastly bigger takes on the same principle, except that they employ the radio portions of the electromagnetic spectrum rather than visible light. The two researchers have worked out what would be needed if the transmitter behind such a burst were solar-powered. They calculate that the amount of sunlight falling onto a planet about twice the size of Earth, and at the right distance from its star to have liquid water on its surface, would yield enough energy to accelerate a spaceship weighing a million tonnes or so to a speed close to that of light before the propulsion beam became too attenuated to propel it any faster. This would be perfect for ferrying large numbers of beings from one star system to another, as long as there was an equivalent device at the other end to slow the craft down again.To check whether such a machine is technologically plausible, the two researchers calculated that the necessary planet-sized array of radio transmitters could be kept cool by nothing more exotic than ordinary water. So, as far as they can see, while building such a machine would be a heroic feat of engineering, nothing in the laws of physics actually forbids it.Saying that the features of FRBs are consistent with their being signs of an alien space-propulsion system is not, of course, the same as saying that this is what they actually are. One early explanation of pulsars—regular cosmic radio signals first observed in 1967 was that they were alien radio beacons. They later turned out to be caused by fast-spinning neutron stars. For physicists, though, that explanation was almost as interesting. A neutron star is one whose protons and electrons have merged with each other to create neutrons. These, together with the star’s pre-existing neutrons, result in an object that has no atoms in it. Since atoms are composed mostly of empty space a neutron star, instead of being star size, is just a few kilometres across. If FRBs turn out to be even a fraction as curious as that, most astronomers would forgive them for not being artificial.

Operating independently for the first time since Chandrayaan-2was launched on July 22, Vikram, the lander, underwent its first manoeuvre around Moon.
Isro successfully completed the first de-orbiting manoeuvre at 8.50 am Tuesday, using for the first time, the propulsion systems on Vikram. All these days all operations were carried out by systems on the orbiter, from which Vikram, carrying Pragyan (rover) inside it, separated from on Monday.
"The duration of the maneuver was 4 seconds. The orbit of Vikram is 104kmX128 km, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter continues to orbit Moon in the existing orbit and both the orbiter and lander are healthy," Isro said.

The next de-orbiting maneuver is scheduled on September 04 between 3.30 am and 4.30 am.
As reported by TOI, the landing module (Vikram and Pragyan) successfully separated from the orbiter at 1.15 pm Monday (September 2), pushing India's Chandrayaan-2 mission into the last and most crucial leg: Moon landing.
"The operation was great in the sense that we were able to separate the lander and rover from the orbiter—It is the first time in the history of Isro that we've separated two modules in space. This was very critical and we did it very meticulously," Isro chairman K Sivan told TOI soon after the separation.

Margaret Hamilton wasn’t supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn—she wanted a graduate degree in math.

But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly—and digitally—possible.

As a working mother in the 1960s, Hamilton was unusual; but as a spaceship programmer, Hamilton was positively radical. Hamilton would bring her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. While 4-year-old Lauren slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to the Apollo’s command module computer.

“People used to say to me, ‘How can you leave your daughter? How can you do this?’” Hamilton remembers. But she loved the arcane novelty of her job. She liked the camaraderie—the after-work drinks at the MIT faculty club; the geek jokes, like saying she was “going to branch left minus” around the hallway. Outsiders didn’t have a clue. But at the lab, she says, “I was one of the guys.”

Then, as now, “the guys” dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today’s diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier. It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.

‘When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West.’ — Margaret Hamilton

As Hamilton’s career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world’s first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments. “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it,” Hamilton says.

This was a decade before Microsoft and nearly 50 years before Marc Andreessen would observe that software is, in fact, “eating the world.” The world didn’t think much at all about software back in the early Apollo days. The original document laying out the engineering requirements of the Apollo mission didn’t even mention the word software, MIT aeronautics professor David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo. “Software was not included in the schedule, and it was not included in the budget.” Not at first, anyhow.