Tag: Satellites

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India’s 104-satellite launch sets a record

PSLV launch
India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on the coast of the Bay of Bengal, sending 104 satellites spaceward. (ISRO Photo)

A record-setting flock of 104 satellites was successfully deployed into orbit overnight after the launch of an Indian rocket. Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries played a part in getting nine of those satellites where they needed to go.

India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, or PSLV, lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota at 9:28 a.m. local time today (7:58 p.m. PT Feb. 14).

The mission’s main payload was the Indian Space Research Organization’s Cartosat 2D, a car-sized satellite designed for environmental mapping. Another 88 Dove nanosatellites, each about the size of a toaster oven, will become part of Planet’s Earth-observing constellation.

Eight more nanosatellites were launched for Spire Global, which is filling out a constellation to monitor weather as well as aviation and maritime traffic. This is the second Spire PSLV mission facilitated by Spaceflight Industries, which handles launch logistics.

Spaceflight also arranged to get Israel Aerospace Industries’ BGUSat nanosatellite on the flight. BGUSat is a research spacecraft built by students at Ben Gurion University to perform cloud imaging and measure atmospheric background radiation.

Six more research satellites rounded out the flock, which represented the highest number of satellites launched on a single rocket. ISRO said all 104 satellites were successfully deployed into pole-to-pole orbits within a half-hour after launch.

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Planet Labs to acquire Google’s satellite venture

An artist’s conception shows Terra Bella’s SkySat satelltes in orbit. (Terra Bella Illustration)
An artist’s conception shows Terra Bella’s SkySat satelltes in orbit. (Terra Bella Illustration)

Planet Labs says it has struck a deal to acquire Google’s Terra Bella satellite imaging operation and its constellation of SkySat satellites, less than three years after Google bought the operation for $500 million.

Financial terms for the acquisition weren’t announced.

The deal includes a multi-year contract under which San Francisco-based Planet would sell satellite data to Google.

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Join the satellite hunt for Peru’s lost cities

Sarah Parcak
University of Alabama archaeologist Sarah Parcak checks satellite imagery of a target site. (National Geographic via YouTube)

Armed with a $1 million TED Prize, archaeologists today launched the GlobalXplorer.org crowdsourcing project to scan satellite imagery for signs of ancient settlements.

“Archaeologists can’t do this on their own,” Parcak told National Geographic, one of the collaborators in the project. “If we don’t go and find these sites, looters will.”

The 38-year-old archaeologist from the University of Alabama at Birmingham has already made a good start, by using satellite images to identify buried pyramids in Egypt and a covered-over Viking village in Newfoundland.

Such feats (and her fedora) have earned her a snazzy nickname – “Indiana Jones of the 21st century” – and more importantly, $1 milllion in seed money from the TED Prize program.

That money has gone toward building a platform that takes in high-resolution images from DigitalGlobe’s satellites and sorts them for perusal by registered GlobalXplorer users. Online tutorials train the users to spot and flag potential archaeological sites, based on subtle variations in vegetation. The most promising crowdsourced sites are put on the list for on-the-ground exploration.

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SpaceX adds lab to Seattle satellite operation

SpaceX Redmond facility
SpaceX has leased Building 117 at Redmond Ridge Corporate Center, which has 40,625 square feet of space. (Sierra Construction)

SpaceX has taken on a 40,625-square-foot facility in Redmond, Wash., that will become a research and development lab for its ambitious satellite operation.

The warehouse-style space in the Redmond Ridge Corporate Center, owned by M&T Partners, is slated for a $2.1 million interior remodeling job, according to a permit application filed last month with King County.

SpaceX is already using a 30,000-square-foot office building that’s about a 10-minute drive away in Redmond.

Setting up the lab, and hiring the engineers who will work there, marks a significant ramp-up for SpaceX’s presence in the Seattle area’s Eastside region. The California-based company’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, established the Redmond operation in 2015 to develop satellites that would provide global internet access.

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Weather satellite sends planetary postcard

GOES-16 view of Earth
This composite color full-disk image from GOES-16, focusing on North and South America, was acquired at 10:07 a.m. PT on Jan. 15. (NOAA / NASA Photo)

Two months after its launch, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-16 weather satellite is sending back its first images – and they’re spectacular.

GOES-16 is watching the Western Hemisphere from a geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above Earth, with a camera known as the Advanced Baseline Imager that provides four times the resolution of previously launched GOES satellites.

In a news release accompanying the first pictures, NOAA says the higher resolution should allow forecasters to pinpoint the location of severe weather with greater accuracy.

The imager scans Earth’s disk five times faster than the earlier generation of GOES cameras. That allows it to produce pictures of the continental U.S. every five minutes, and full-disk views every 15 minutes.

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SpaceX finances revealed on eve of launch

SpaceX Falcon 9 readied
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is readied to launch 10 Iridium Next satellites into orbit at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. (Iridium Photo via Twitter)

As SpaceX prepares for its first Falcon 9 rocket launch in five months, a new report about the company’s finances is pointing to the importance of getting back to routine operations – and the importance of SpaceX’s satellite operation in the Seattle area.

Today’s report in The Wall Street Journal is based on a look at the privately held company’s internal financial documents. Those documents indicate that the company lost $260 million on revenues of nearly $1 billion in 2015.

The main factor behind that loss was the schedule disruption caused by the breakup of a Falcon 9 shortly after liftoff in June of that year.

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SoftBank boosts OneWeb satellite network

Image: Satellite web
An artist’s conception shows a constellation of satellites in orbit. (Credit: OneWeb)

The OneWeb internet satellite venture says it has secured another $1.2 billion in investment, including a billion dollars from SoftBank Group.

OneWeb said the new infusion of capital will support the construction of a high-volume satellite production facility in Exploration Park, Fla., capable of producing 15 satellites a week. Production is to begin in 2018, with an eye toward having OneWeb’s network operating by as early as 2019.

The operation is expected to create nearly 3,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the next four years, including jobs in engineering and manufacturing, OneWeb said.

SoftBank’s investment serves as an initial follow-through on a pledge made by the Japan-based conglomerate’s chairman and CEO, Masayoshi Son, to President-elect Donald Trump. During a meeting in New York this month, Son told Trump that he’d invest $50 billion in the U.S. to create 50,000 jobs.

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Hurricane-watching microsatellites go in orbit

Rocket deployment
A photo taken from a NASA F-18 chase plane shows Orbital ATK’s L-1011 Stargazer jet deploying a Pegasus XL rocket to launch eight CYGNSS satellites. (NASA Photo / Lori Losey)

After several days of delays, a squadron of eight microsatellites was sent into orbit by a rocket launched from a high-flying airplane. Their mission? To study the winds that power the heart of a hurricane.

The launch was originally scheduled for Dec. 12, and then for Dec. 14. Each time, technical glitches forced a postponement. But today, it was all systems go as Orbital ATK’s Lockheed L-1011 Stargazer jet took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Fliroda.

An hour after takeoff, the airplane released a three-stage Pegasus rocket from an altitude of 39,000 feet. The Pegasus fired up its rocket engines and deployed the eight suitcase-sized satellites into low Earth orbit.

“The deployments looked great,” said Southwest Research Institute’s John Scherrer, a project manager for the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, or CYGNSS. “Right on time.”

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Syria crisis tests BlackSky satellite data portal

Image: BlackSky platform provides Aleppo data
BlackSky’s online imaging platform can link a satellite view of the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo to real-time social media streams about the area to provide greater context. (Spaceflight Industries Graphic)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries is giving early adopters a preview of its online BlackSky satellite imagery platform, which blends overhead views of sites around the world with social-media posts and other reports about what’s shown in the pictures.

One of the first subjects to be tackled is the humanitarian crisis in the Syrian city of Aleppo, where tens of thousands of civilians have been caught in devastating bombing attacks and house-to-house fighting. That’s apt, because the members of the early adopter program include the United Nations as well as the World Bank and RS Metrics, a company that uses satellite imagery to track global developments.

“Tracking critical global events as they happen is of interest to all of our early customers,” Jodi Sorenson, vice president of marketing and communications at Spaceflight Industries, told GeekWire in an emailed comment. “We chose to use Aleppo as an example to demonstrate the platform’s ability to provide insights on areas of particular international importance.”

The BlackSky platform offers access to imagery from more than 10 Earth-watching satellites, including Korea’s KOMPSAT spacecraft and UrtheCast’s Deimos-2. Customers can also use the platform to order up near-real-time images of specified sites.

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Planet lands in Seattle to work on satellite data

Karthik Govindhasamy
Karthik Govindhasamy, Planet’s chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering, shows off a mural that depicts Dove satellites being deployed from the International Space Station. The mural graces the reception area of Planet’s Bellevue office. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – Planet has landed … in the Seattle area.

The upstart satellite imaging company formerly known as Planet Labs has moved into a 3,000-square-foot office in Bellevue’s Northup North Office Park, and plans to have 10 software engineers working there by the end of the year.

Two engineers were hired for the office as of this week, when GeekWire paid a visit. That’s not counting Karthik Govindhasamy, a former Microsoft and Nokia engineer who is now Planet’s chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering.

Govindhasamy is in charge of the Bellevue office, and he’s happy to be part of the Seattle area’s growing space community.

“We wanted to be close to the ecosystem,” Govindhasamy said. “SpaceX is nearby. Microsoft is in the neighborhood.”

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