...the who's who,
and the what's what 
of the space industry

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Copernical Team

Copernical Team

Thursday, 19 December 2013 09:40

Space-Time Insight

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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. 

Wednesday, 18 December 2013 16:31

Planetary Science Institute (PSI)

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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.

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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.

Wednesday, 18 December 2013 16:12

Iranian Space Agency (ISA)

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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. 

Wednesday, 18 December 2013 16:01

American Geophysical Union (AGU)

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The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a nonprofit organization of geophysicists with the mission to promote discovery in Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity.

It is consisting of thousands of members from 144 countries, the members being individual scientists.

AGU's activities are focused on the organization and dissemination of scientific information in the interdisciplinary and international field of geophysics. The geophysical sciences involve four fundamental areas: atmospheric and ocean sciences; solid-Earth sciences; hydrologic sciences; and space sciences.

Saturday, 14 December 2013 14:26

Chang'e-3 mission

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Chang'e 3  is a lunar exploration mission operated by the China National Space Administration, incorporating a robotic lander and a rover. Chang'e 3 was launched in December 2013 as part of the second phase of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program.

It is China's first lunar rover. 

The spacecraft is named after Chang'e, the goddess of the Moon in Chinese mythology, and is a follow-up to the Chang'e 1 and Chang'e 2 lunar orbiters.

The lunar rover is called Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, a name selected in an online poll that comes from a Chinese myth about a white rabbit that lives on the Moon as a pet of the moon goddess Chang'e. 

It achieved lunar orbit on 6 December 2013, and landed on 14 December at 13:11 UTC, becoming the first object to soft-land on the moon since Luna 24 in 1976.

Saturday, 14 December 2013 14:18

Yutu rover

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Yutu is a Chinese lunar rover which forms part of the Chang'e 3 mission to the Moon.

Launched on 1 December 2013, and landed on 14 December 2013. If successful it will be the first rover to operate on the Moon since Lunokhod 2 ceased operations in May 1973.

The official mission objective is to achieve China's first soft-landing and roving exploration on the Moon, as well as to develop and analyze key technological developments.

(Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, was a name selected in an online poll; it is a Chinese myth about a white pet rabbit of the Moon goddess Chang'e.)

Saturday, 14 December 2013 14:06

Philae lander

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Philae is a robotic European Space Agency lander that accompanies its Rosetta spacecraft. It is designed to land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko shortly after arrival in 2014. The lander is named after Philae island in the Nile, where an obelisk was found that was used along with the Rosetta Stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic.

Just as the Philae(*) Obelisk and the Rosetta Stone provided the keys to an ancient civilisation, the Philae lander and the Rosetta orbiter aim to unlock the mysteries of the oldest building blocks of our Solar System - comets.

(*) Philae is the island in the river Nile on which an obelisk was found that had a bilingual inscription including the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy in Egyptian hieroglyphs. This provided the French historian Jean-François Champollion with the final clues that enabled him to decipher the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone and unlock the secrets of the civilisation of ancient Egypt.

Friday, 13 December 2013 06:15

Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC)

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The Deep Space Atomic Clock project (DSAC), will fly and validate a miniaturized, ultra-precise mercury-ion atomic clock that is orders of magnitude more stable than today's best navigation clocks.

DSAC: Key Mission Facts

  • The Deep Space Atomic Clock will be orders of magnitude more stable than any other atomic clock flown in space, as well as smaller and lighter.
  • This NASA Technology Demonstration Mission will shift paradigms for navigating spacecraft to distant destinations, enabling collection of more data with better precision; and enabling autonomous radio navigation for time-critical events such as orbit insertion or landing.
  • This mission will deliver the next generation of deep-space radio science.

Precise radio navigation -- using radio frequencies to determine position -- is vital to the success of a range of deep-space exploration missions. Ground-based atomic clocks have long been the cornerstone of most deep-space vehicle navigation because they provide root data necessary for precise positioning. The Deep Space Atomic Clock will deliver the same stability and accuracy for spacecraft exploring the solar system. This new capability could forever change the way we conduct deep-space navigation -- by eliminating the need to "turn signals around" for tracking. Much the same way modern Global Positioning Systems, or GPS, use one-way signals to enable terrestrial navigation services, the Deep Space Atomic Clock will provide the same capability in deep-space navigation -- with such extreme accuracy that researchers will be required to carefully account for the effects of relativity, or the relative motion of an observer and observed objected, as impacted by gravity, space and time (clocks in GPS-based satellite, for example, must be corrected to account for this effect, or their navigational fixes begin to drift).

Over the past 20 years, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have been steadily improving and miniaturizing the mercury-ion trap atomic clock, preparing it to operate in the harsh environment of deep space. In the laboratory setting, the Deep Space Atomic Clock's precision has been refined to permit drift of no more than 1 nanosecond in 10 days.

Now (Dec. 2013) the DSAC team is preparing a miniaturized, low-mass atomic clock -- orders of magnitude more accurate and stable than any other atomic clock flown in space, while still being smaller and lighter -- for a test flight in low-Earth orbit. The clock will make use of GPS signals to demonstrate precision orbit determination and confirm its performance, promising new savings on mission operations costs, delivering more science data and enabling further development of deep-space autonomous radio navigation.
The DSAC project currently is building a demonstration unit and payload to be hosted on a spacecraft provided by Surrey Satellite Technologies U.S. of Englewood, Colo. It will launch to Earth orbit in 2015, where the payload will be operated for at least a year to demonstrate its functionality and utility for one-way-based navigation.

Friday, 13 December 2013 05:46

Juno spacecraft

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Juno is a NASA New Frontiers mission to the planet Jupiter.

Juno was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on August 5, 2011 and will arrive in July 2016.

The spacecraft is to be placed in a polar orbit to study Jupiter's composition, gravity field, magnetic field, and polar magnetosphere. Juno will also search for clues about how it formed, including whether Jupiter has a rocky core, the amount of water present within the deep atmosphere, and how its mass is distributed. It will also study its deep winds, which can reach speeds of 618 kilometers per hour (384 mph).

recommended: Mission home and videos

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