Space blog

Satellites for breakfast anyone?

Tuesday, November 20. 2007

In a recent breakfast meeting, held at the University Of Surrey, SSTL Principal Engineer Dr Stuart Eves spoke to students about SSTL. The Company was formed in 1985 by the University of Surrey and was the first professional organisation to offer low-cost small satellites. SSTL has come along way since its University days and now employs more than 260 people at their purpose built offices on the Surrey Research Park, but the spirit of innovation and the will to challenge perceptions remains to this day.

Far out: MoonRaker

60 attended the talk “the PC computers of space”, which provided an introduction to small satellites and highlights of missions that have been launched to date, including updates on the status of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) and the GIOVE-A navigation satellite mission. The future applications of small satellites, including potential science, communications, and Earth observation missions were also discussed.

Stuart Eves is a Principal Engineer at Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in Guildford. He spent 16 years with the UK Ministry of Defence where he initiated the TopSat satellite programme which is now on-orbit conducting its Earth-observation mission. He joined SSTL in 2004 and has an MSc in Astrophysics, a PhD in constellation design, and has been a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society for more than 15 years.

An, you can read his "Is Pluto really a planet" Space Blog here and school students will be interested to hear that Dr. Eves is responsible for a competition that will give the winner the chance to fly their experiment on an SSTL spacecraft! Keep your eye on Space Blog, or "subscribe" by RSS using the buttons on the top left for more information!

Posted by Robin Wolstenholme in Cooperation, In the news, Space at 12:52 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)