Space blog

SSTL has been short listed by the Times Higher Awards 2006 for its “Outstanding Contribution to Innovation and Technology”, an extremely competitive category in the awards.

Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) was a spin-off company from the department of electronic
engineering at the University of Surrey to develop satellite technology. The award considered the successful technology transfer from academic research and the role of the SSTL-run Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) in the support for relief missions after disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

The award short list also recognised the commercial success of SSTL, which has generated a turnover of £118 million and specialises in the construction of low-cost satellites and services using commercial off-the-shelf technology.

The short list, published today, also recognized SSTL’s achievements in TopSat, a high resolution imaging satellite built for the UK Government, and GIOVE-A, the first demonstrator for the planned European Galileo positioning system which were both successfully launched in 2005.

Times Higher Education Supplement

Some 200 International business and government leaders gathered this week in Washington DC at the Commercial Remote Sensing Satellite Symposium hosted by NOAA and USGS to explore the current issues facing this important business sector.

The symposium included keynote speeches and interactive panel discussions on a range of topics pertaining to the commercial remote sensing global market. Sir Martin Sweeting headed up the second day and addressed the “Challenges of the International Environment”.

Sir Martin focused his attention on  the role of small satellites in changing the economics of space and particularly their impact on Earth observation and remote sensing. He used high resolution (2.5m & 4m) images from the latest satellites built by SSTL for the UK and China (TOPSAT & BEIJING-1) to illustrate the dramatic increase in capabilities now offered by EO satellites - all within with a mass of about 150kg and costing around £10M.

When making our blog entries we are always on the ”look out” for interesting and unusual satellite applications. Well, this week we have something “completely different”! Eagle Island, in the Chagos Archipelago, is overrun by rats! And it’s all thanks to the human population that inhabited the island until 1935. Before that coconuts where farmed to provide oil, principally for lamps, but with electricity becoming widely available the economics of transporting the commodity from Eagle Island just didn’t stack up. So the Island was left to return to nature - the problem was the rats stayed and truly made the island their home!

Now Eagle Island, at 5 x 0.5 km is the second largest in the archipelago after Diego Garcia and the only island in the Great Chagos Bank to be infested by the Black Rat (other rat-infested islands occur in other island groups of the archipelago, and Diego Garcia is also heavily infested). Our friends the rats are seemingly preventing the breeding of seabirds which on other islands within the group are prolific, providing some of the most valuable seabird breeding areas in the entire Indian Ocean despite the tiny sizes of these islands. The rats were also maintaining a less than desirable vegetation state by preventing the regeneration of indigenous species and by feeding on the eggs and hatchlings of nesting marine turtles. There are no land birds on the island, probably in large part due to the rat presence. Anyway, that’s all changing now and we can measure this by using satellite imagery.

So how were the rats controlled? Firstly a baiting grid 30 x 30m was established across the entire island based on lines cut by hand through the dense vegetation by the eleven expedition members over a 6 week period during April this year. These provided an excellent opportunity to conduct a Rapid Assessment Survey of the state of the environment of the entire island surface using the resulting 2,844 grid points as recording stations. Ten parameters including the type of vegetation were recorded at each station by four expedition members. This data is now being mapped and together with other expedition results will be the subject of a "state of the environment" report later in the year.

Satellite imagery has been difficult to come by, not least because there is seemingly little of general interest to the world on tiny uninhabited islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. As the result satellites are rarely focused - if at all - on the island, and any resulting images are almost unobtainable. The CHRIS images from the Surrey Space Centre will accurately compare images taken in April this year with those due to be taken in October. The CHRIS images will also high quality maps for conservation management purposes.

Results of the assessments will be used in assisting future management processes in this far-flung location, part of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), not least in monitoring the effects of the rat eradication and any other interventions to be made in future conservation.

So it’s bad news for the rats but good news for the Island's environment and sea bird colonies.

SSTL's GIOVE-A Galileo test satellite has been in the news again this week. This is mainly as a result of the Government's boost to UK space, increasing Galileo project funding by 20 million as reported by Computing on the Vnunet website.

GIOVE-A has generated interest since its launch on the 28th December because it marked the beginning of a European Space Project to be proud of. Galileo is an exciting development promising exciting new capabilities for services, businesses and the general public.

Meanwhile, there is still talk about Cornell University's work decoding preliminary Galileo test signals from GIOVE-a. The Guardian online recorded this, to our knowledge only the second news source to link to our Space Blog since Spaceref.com and the first to quote your humble space blogger.

The Guardian online also published some additional information on the Galileo signal decoding which we feel may help ease some sore heads.

Of course GIOVE-A is not the only space topic around. Pluto's demotion is still generating a great deal of interest, The Scientific American producing one of the most entertaining blogs, a rival for our own inveterate enthusiast for all things space, Stuart Eves.