Achievements
Our Director, Professor Sir Martin Sweeting OBE FRS was awarded a knighthood in the Queen's New Year's Honours list in 2002 for services to microsatellite engineering.
In 1998 the Surrey Space Centre was awarded the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement for their innovative design of modular microsatellites that has become a world-wide standard. This award was presented by HM Queen during the royal visit to the Surrey Space Centre in December 1998.
Over the last two decades the Space Centre has established a reputation for the development of innovatoive systems and demonstrated a number of firsts world wide in the area of small satellite use. We have demonstrated the first GPS receiver to work on a microsatellite in space; we demonstrated the fastest position fix in space and developed and flown the world's smallest attitude determination and control system. We have been among the first to demonstrate attitude determination using multiple GPS receivers and are poised to demonstrate the first GPS reflectometry of ocean state.
The Surrey Nanosatellite Application Platform (SNAP) was developed through research projects within the Space Centre and launched in June 2000. This small 8.5kg satellite was the world's smallest fully functional nanosatellite complete with miniaturised attitude control system for 3-axis stabilised satellites using a miniature momentum wheel; miniaturised GPS receiver for autonomous orbit control; a propulsion system for formation flying manoeuvres; a CMOS machine vision system for automated inspection and an inter-satellite communication system for receiving GPS data from other satellites in a formation. This platform reduces the costs of missions to LEO by a further order of magnitude from the low cost microsatellites and paves the way for robotic space missions.
Surrey has also been one of the first to demonstrate a fully automated orbit maintenance system that corrected for the effects of atmospheric drag on the minisatellite UoSAT-12. The satellite was automatically manoeuvred into a repeat ground-track orbit with a 7 day 120 orbit cycle with two passes directly over the Guildford groundstation each cycle. The satellite was then maintained in this orbit for a period of 8 months autonomously correcting for energy loss due to drag.
With the opportunity of the combined launch of SNAP-1 and the Tsinghua microsatellite we also attempted the first formation flying experiment in LEO. The SNAP propulsion system was used to correct for the effects of differential drag between it and the microsatellite and to adjust the altitude to phase with the microsatellite. The aim was to use the onboard vision system to photograph the microsatellite whilst maintaining a fixed separation in coorbit. The mission successfully demonstrated the techniques of phasing the two satellites but due to limited propellent available was unable to complete the rendezvous during a time of high solar activity which exacerbated the differential drag effects.
