CubeSail is an educational satellite project at the Surrey Space Centre (SSC).

Several PhD projects are centred on its development, and it will serve as a technology platform for at least two further educational satellites developed at SSC. The CubeSail mission objectives are ambitious, and will raise the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of several technologies to flight demonstration level. A key feature is the deployment of a 25m2 sail structure, which will be used to demonstrate the propulsive effect of solar radiation pressure (i.e. solar sailing) and will demonstrate the de-orbiting capabilities of the sail as a drag augmentation device.

CubeSail will be the first launched three-axis stabilised solar sail, and makes use of a novel centre of mass/centre of pressure (CM/CP) offset technique to provide enhanced attitude control. In order to achieve the mission objectives, CubeSail will build on small satellite experience at SSC, such as the STRaND-1 nanosatellite, launched on February 25th 2013.

Furthermore, the mission critical sail deployment mechanism has undergone an extensive testing and validation process as part of the ESA Gossamer Deorbiter project carried out at SSC. The Cubesail project is also financially and technically supported by industrial partners, Astrium and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.

Gossamer Deorbiter Sail: The purpose of this project is to develop a gossamer sail system that can be used for deorbiting satellites at end-of-life.

The principle that the system will use to achieve deorbiting is aerodynamic drag from the larger surface area. The system is intended mainly for low Earth orbit (LEO) telecom satellites but can potentially also be used in higher orbits, making use of solar radiation pressure to perform end-of-life manoeuvres. 

A first demonstrator has been developed and tested by SSC in 2013 (see demonstrator page here).

Since there were many unfinished or failed attempts to prove that solar sailing is operational, ESA and DLR decided to start the collaborative Gossamer project. When all three steps of the Gossamer roadmap have successfully been completed, the solar sail propulsion will be declared operational and can be used in space mission. To ensure that Gossamer will not fail, ESA and DLR concentrate on a pure technological demonstrator mission with increasing complexity and level of difficulty in the three steps. Moreover, any scientific payload will be abandoned. It shall also be secured, that all Gossamer technologies are scalable. To avoid a failure in material or technologies, only those are used which have previously been proved and tested in numerous studies and projects. Finally, the Gossamer project and its technological success shall be perfectly documented and communicated to potential users.

The projected roadmap of DLR-ESA Gossamer contains three stages:

• Gossamer-1: launch in 2013: Demonstration of the safe deployment of a 5m x 5m solar sail in a 320km Earth orbit. 
• Gossamer-2: launch in 2014: Deployment of a 20m x 20m solar sail in a 500km Earth orbit. Mass of 57 kg (inclusive margin) and container volume 50x50x60cm3 inside the rocking fairing. Test of a limited orbit and attitude control. The scheduled lifetime is about four weeks.
• Gossamer-3: launch in 2015: Deployment of a 50m x 50m solar sail in a > 10.000km Earth orbit. Mass of about 80kg and container volume 100x100x100cm3. Test of the full orbit and attitude control.

see also: ESA page ; DLR page

The Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (Centre for Astrophysics of the University of Porto - CAUP) is the largest astronomy research institute in Portugal. It is a private research institute, non-profit making and recognized as being of public utility by the Portuguese Government.

• Its objectives include the promotion and support of astronomy through
• research
• education at graduate and undergraduate levels
• activities for primary and secondary schools
• science outreach and the popularisation of astronomy
• CAUP is responsible for the scientific management of the planetarium of Porto.

Research teams:

• Origin and Evolution of Stars and Planets - Star Formation and Early Evolution; Planetary Systems (Exoplanets); Stellar Populations and Stellar Evolution
• Galaxies and Observational Cosmology - Physical properties of massive galaxies; Galaxy cluster astrophysics; Structure formation paradigms; Dynamical dark energy; Varying fundamental constants

The EXOEarths program aims at doing frontier research to explore:

• in unique detail the stellar limitations of the radial-velocity technique, as well as ways of reducing them, having in mind the detection of Earth-like planets
• to develop and apply software packages aiming at the study of the properties of the planet host stars, having in mind the full characterization of the newfound planets, as well as understanding planet formation processes.

These goals will improve our capacity to detect, study, and characterize new very low mass extra-solar planets. The results of this project will have a strong impact on the exploitation of future instruments, like the ESPRESSO spectrograph for the VLT. They will also be of extreme importance to current state-of-the-art planet-search projects aiming at the discovery of other Earths, in particular those making use of the radial-velocity method.

The NEOWISE project is the asteroid-hunting portion of the Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WISE) mission. Funded by NASA's Planetary Science Division, NEOWISE harvests asteroids and comets from the WISE images and provides an archive for searching the WISE data for solar system scientists.

The mission began its life as WISE for its first eight months of survey operations until the frozen hydrogen cooling the telescope was depleted. The mission continued as NEOWISE for an additional four months, finishing up its survey of the inner solar system.

The NEOWISE project was responsible for archiving the millions of individual images collected by the WISE telescope. To date, the NEOWISE team has delivered infrared detections of more than 158,000 minor planets to the scientific community, including more than 34,000 new discoveries.

NEOWISE data have been used to set limits on the numbers, orbits, sizes, and probable compositions of asteroids throughout our solar system, and the mission discovered the first known Earth Trojan asteroid.

The project is called FINDS Exo-Earths (which stands for Fiber-optic Improved Next generation Doppler Search for Exo-Earths).

The Planetary Society had teamed up with planet hunters Debra Fischer of Yale University and Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley to help with the quest to find other "Earths," other worlds like our own, elsewhere in our galaxy.

This high-end optical system was installed on the 3-meter telescope at the Lick Observatory and dramatically increased discoveries of smaller exoplanets and has been playing a crucial role in verifying Earth-sized planet candidates from the Kepler planet-hunter mission.

This is exactly the kind of project the Society has always excelled at. It's a small, vital effort, overlooked and under-valued by the space community's "Powers That Be." And we can see that it offers an incredible cost-benefit ratio.

Space-Time Insight is an American company based in San Mateo, California, USA, developing geospatial information systems (GIS).

Space-Time Insight objective is to change the way utilities and other organizations with critical assets manage their resources and respond to crises that impact operations, customer service, revenue and risk. From traditional transmission, communications and transportation networks to smart grids and smart cities, our next generation situational intelligence solution makes critical infrastructure smarter, safer and more reliable. We enable enterprises to visualize and analyze their resources across location and time, rapidly respond to disruptions in service, and exceed performance and reliability goals. 

Space-Time Insight's products simplify the detection of problematic situations or potential issues in a geographically-distributed network of resources and assets, provide insights into what the specific issue is and its cause, and help personnel take the appropriate corrective action. 

The Planetary Science Institute (PSI) is a private, nonprofit corporation dedicated to Solar System exploration. It is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, where it was founded in 1972.

PSI scientist are involved in numerous NASA and international missions, the study of Mars and other planets, the Moon, asteroids, comets, interplanetary dust, impact physics, the origin of the solar system, extra-solar planet formation, dynamics, the rise of life, and other areas of research. They conduct fieldwork on all continents of the Earth. They are also actively involved in science education and public outreach though school programs, children's books, popular science books and art.

PSI scientists are based in 20 states and the District of Columbia, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Russia, South Africa, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The European Satellite Operators' Association (ESOA) was formed in March 2002 to represent the interests of the industry with key European organisations, including the European Commission, Parliament, Council and the European Space Agency as well as other international organisations.

ESOA's goals include ensuring that satellites benefit from the appropriate political, industrial and regulatory environment to fulfil their vital role in the delivery of communications. ESOA is governed by a Board of Directors, made up of the CEO's of its Member Companies.

ESOA is a CEO-driven association representing 22 global and regional satellite operators. ESOA provides thought-leadership and is recognised as the representative body for satellite operators by international, regional and national bodies including regulators, policymakers, standards-setting organisations such as 3GPP and international organisations such as the International Telecommunications Union and the World Economic Forum.

The Iranian Space Agency (ISA) is Iran's governmental space agency.

Iran is an active participant in the Asian space race and became an orbital-launch-capable nation in 2009.