Copernical Team
Sustainability in space—can you teach old satellites new tricks?
We've all heard that we should "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" to save the planet, but what about applying any of the "three R's" to space?
Researchers at USC Viterbi's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) are tackling this challenge—looking at how to reuse physical items that are already in space, namely, old satellites.
Legacy Satellites
There are currently several thousand satellites orbiting Earth. Many have already completed their missions or have outlived their primary lifespans—these are "legacy satellites." And while some of them may have broken hardware and will eventually run out of energy, leave orbit, and burn out in space, others are physically in good condition. So, the question becomes: what to do with them?
Alefiya Hussain, ISI Research Team Leader explained, "This project is looking at ways to possibly reuse satellites for different things. We are collaborating with the software company Tangram Flex to figure out how we can replace the software components within the satellites to re-purpose them."
She continued, "The approach we've taken is to look inside the satellite and say, this particular piece of software did this particular function before, can we actually replace that function to make it do something else as a path to repurposing it?"
NASA's Voyager will do more science with new power strategy
The plan will keep Voyager 2's science instruments turned on a few years longer than previously anticipated, enabling yet more revelations from interstellar space.
Launched in 1977, the Voyager 2 spacecraft is more than 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from Earth, using five science instruments to study interstellar space.
Arianegroup, Eutelsat And Magellium Selected To Improve French Space Surveillance Capabilities
ArianeGroup, Eutelsat and Magellium have won a contract from the French space agency (CNES), as part of the space component of the France 2030. Investing for the Future plan, with the aim of enhancing space surveillance capabilities in order to substantially improve the security of space operations.
The consortium will provide CNES with a Space Situational Awareness (SSA) data service thro Another giant leap into space: Successful launch of Lumelite-4 to enhance maritime communications
A microsatellite for maritime communications developed by the Satellite Technology And Research Centre (STAR) under the National University of Singapore's College of Design and Engineering (NUS CDE), and A*STAR's Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), has been successfully launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikotta, India, on Saturday, 22 April 2023 at 4.50pm (Singapore time). CGI to extend machine learning to LEO satellite network optimisation
CGI (NYSE: GIB) has been awarded a further contract by the European Space Agency (ESA) under ESA's ARTES Core Competitiveness program, with the support of the UK Space Agency, to expand the development of its Dynamic Predictive Routing (DPR) tool.
The tool uses machine learning to enhance the routing of traffic in dynamic networks in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), especially those incorporating la Framework for Roman Spacecraft moves to Goddard clean room
The primary structure that will serve as the "bones" of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has moved into the big clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The spacecraft bus, Roman's primary support element, will now be built upon this skeletal framework. When it launches by May 2027, Roman will help unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, search Milky Way's fate? Astronomers reveal what ignites quasars
Astronomers said Wednesday that for the first time they have confirmed what ignites quasars, the brightest and most powerful objects in the universe, which put galaxies in their "death throes".
These celestial behemoths form when two galaxies smash into each other, the astronomers said, warning that this could be the Milky Way's fate in a few billion years.
Quasars are one of the most ex Astronomers coming closer to understanding mysterious fast radio bursts
Astronomers in a Canadian research program made a significant discovery that could lead to a better understanding of the mysterious phenomenon known as fast radio bursts.
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment's fast radio burst project discovered 25 repeating fast radio bursts coming from deep space and 14 potential repeaters. This discovery doubles the number of known fast Scientists discover rare element in exoplanet's atmosphere
The rare metal terbium has been found in an exoplanet's atmosphere for the first time. The researchers at Lund University in Sweden have also developed a new method for analyzing exoplanets, making it possible to study them in more detail.
KELT-9 b is the galaxy's hottest exoplanet, orbiting its distant star about 670 light years from Earth. The celestial body, with an average temperature Astronomers image for the first time a black hole's shadow together with a powerful jet
"Previously we had seen both the black hole and the jet in separate images, but now we have taken a panoramic picture of the black hole together with its jet at a new wavelength", says Ru-Sen Lu, from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and leader of a Max Planck Research Group at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The surrounding material is thought to fall into the black hole in a process know