Dr Pechev Wins Entrepreneur Award

SSC Lecturer Dr Alexandre Pechev has been awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering's ERA Foundation Entrepreneurs Award 2010. As a result of Alexandre's research into the control of satellites it is now possible to have for the first-time, truly interactive, real-time, full body animation of many characters and different user generated creatures in a computer game.

Alexandre was presented with his award at the Game Developers Conference in California where he is currently showcasing his IKinema technology.

Research Fellowships and Studentships available at SSC

There is currently a vacancy for a Research Fellow at the Surrey Space Centre: Miniaturised Monopropellant Microthrusters using MEMS for Satellite Inspection.

Additionally, there are currently two studentships available at the Surrey Space Centre: EPSRC Industrial CASE Studentship with QinetiQ in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Advanced Spaceborne Receivers for New Galileo Navigation Signals.

Happy Birthday UoSAT-2 .... 26 years old today

Built in just 6 months from scratch and launched from Vandenberg AFB on a Delta with Landsat-D on 1 March 1984, UoSAT-2 (UO-11) was still transmitting last week on 145.825 MHz AFSK-FM at 1200 bps after 26 years in orbit! The on-board batteries are exhausted, so the satellite now only operates in sunlight and has inactive beacons at 435.025 MHz and 2401MHz.

UoSAT-2 carried a Digitalker speech synthesiser and experiments including magnetometers, a CCD camera, a Geiger-Muller tube and a microphone to detect micrometeoroid impacts. The satellite was instrumental in providing a communications link from the Canadian-Soviet Ski-Trek support teams to the expedition party in 1986. The position of the skiers' emergency beacon was calculated daily by Cospas-Sarsat ground stations and relayed to them, and thousands of amateur radio listeners, as a spoken message (hear it here) from the Digitalker on board UO-11. The message could also serve as an emergency channel to the skiers in the event that all other radio links failed.

UoSAT-2 also carried the Digital Communications Experiment (DCE) that was the first digital packet store-&-forward payload on a microsatellite and you can find more details here

Dr Craig Underwood Gives Lecture to CalTech

On Tuesday 23rd February 12 noon California time, 9pm UK time, Dr Craig Underwood gave a 1 hour lecture to class of 25 Aerospace students and JPL staff at GALCIT, California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Passedena, US, using internet technology. Through the latest internet video conferencing, Craig was able to deliver a lecture on the principles of Small Satelllite Design, and present initial spacecraft bus design concepts for the "Autonomous Assembly of a Reconfigurable Space Telescope (ARReST)" mission concept being jointly developed by SSC, CalTech and NASA/JPL. This is the first time that SSC has delivered a lecture by remote presence via the internet. The technology proved robust, and the lecture was very well received. Follow-up lectures will be delivered as the project progresses.

The AAReST mission is based around spacecraft bus technology derived from Surrey's SNAP nano-satellite programme, lead by Craig, and SSC's CubeSat research, lead by Dr Vaios Lappas and Dr Tanya Vladimirova. The telescope payload is being developed by CalTech and NASA/JPL, and comprises a main mirror telescope, with six "satellite" mirrors - know as mirrorcraft. The mirrorcraft will be able to undock and re-dock autonomously to change the configuration of the telescope to allow various astronomical and Earth observation optical experiments to be carried out. If supported, the mission could be ready to fly in 2012/2013. The mission provides a challenge requiring a great advance in small satellite technology, and SSC is uniquely placed to deliver this, with its advanced research in astrodynamics, micro-propulsion, avionics and inter-satellite link technology.

Prof. Sir Martin Sweeting Receives IET Faraday Medal

Professor Sir Martin Sweeting has been awarded the Institution of Engineering and Technology's (IET) most prestigious award, the Faraday Medal in recognition of "his visionary leadership, satellite expertise, ambition and drive, which among other things, brought the overheads involved in space exploration, down to earth."

Further details are available in the IET's press release.

SSC Tests Martian Rovers

Dr Minh-Tri Pham and Ms Karin Shala from SSC's Autonomy & AI Research Group recently took part in a test of the Bridget Martian rover prototype in a quarry near to Stevenage, UK. Karin and Minh-Tri were working as part of the EU FP7's PRoVisG project and towards their own PhD and Postdoc research under supervision of Dr Yang Gao. The quarry was chosen for its similarity to Martian terrain. The field trials were completed successfully with a new set of images that will support the future work in both projects.

Videos of the tests are available from BBC News and CNN.

SSC Lecturer Invited to Teach at COSPAR Summer School

Dr Yang Gao of SSC (3^rd from right in the photo) was one of the nine invited lecturers at the COSPAR organized summer school on Lunar and Planetary Surface Science in Harbin, China on 6^th-19^th September 2009. This summer school covers topics on design of instruments for measuring surface and subsurface properties and how to evaluate the data, design of planetary robotic tools with emphasis on lunar applications, various mission design and spacecraft navigation techniques. The program also included workshops to discuss instrument design and data collected from new missions such as Phoenix, Rosetta, Chang’E 1 and Chandrayaan-1. Details about the workshop can be found at http://astro.hit.edu.cn/cospar2009workshop/programme.html

SSC Researcher becomes ESA Astronaut

Dr Andreas Mogensen has been appointed as one of the next intake of European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts. Andreas is currently researching the guidance and control of spacecraft during the terminal descent phase of planetary landings at the Surrey Space Centre. He was one of only six people selected from an initial 8413 applicants. Further details are available on ESA's Human Spaceflight pages.