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Designed to manoeuvre the smallest classes of satellite, the operation of this Iridium Catalysed Electrolysis CubeSat Thruster (ICE-Cube Thruster) developed with Imperial College in the UK is based on electrolysis.

This tiny fingernail-length space thruster chip runs on the greenest propellant of all: water.

Avoiding any need for bulky gaseous propellant storage, an associated electrolyser runs a 20-watt current through water to produce hydrogen and oxygen to propel the thruster.

The problem of space debris would worsen even if we sent nothing else into orbit.

ESA’s Space Environment report 2023 was published last August and highlighted a key problem: space debris. “Our planet is surrounded by spacecraft carrying out important work to study our changing climate, deliver global communication and navigation services and help us answer important scientific questions,” noted the report.

“But some of their orbits are getting crowded and increasingly churning with deadly, fast-moving pieces of defunct satellites and rockets that threaten our future in space.”

Continue reading “Stop crowding earth’s orbital environment: ESA report” »

Source: Imperial College/ESA

The engine called the Iridium Catalysed Electrolysis CubeSat Thruster (ICE-Cube Thruster) is based on electrolysis, a process that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using an electric current. The hydrogen and oxygen are then fed into a combustion chamber and nozzle less than 1mm in length to produce thrust.

The US Space Force’s ‘Victus Nox’ mission launched aboard a Firefly Alpha rocket that lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

The US Space Force announced in a press statement today, September 15, that Firefly Aerospace successfully launched a Millennium Space satellite yesterday.

That mission launched on an incredibly short 24-hour timeline, showcasing the capability for rapid deployment of national security missions.

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — U.S. chief space operations Gen. Chance Saltzman on Sept. 12 announced the Space Force will experiment with a new command structure where a unit is responsible for all aspects of a mission area, including training, procurement and operations.

Two integrated units will be established, each run by a Space Force colonel — one for space electronic warfare; and the other for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) satellites.

This is a departure from the current structure where responsibilities for procurement, maintenance, sustainment and operations are fragmented under separate chains of command, Saltzman said in a keynote speech at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual conference.

PARIS – Elon Musk’s SpaceX is no longer absorbing the cost of the Starlink antennas that it sells with its satellite internet service, a company executive said on Wednesday, a key step to the company improving its profitability.

“We were subsidizing terminals but we’ve been iterating on our terminal production so much that we’re no longer subsidizing terminals, which is a good place to be,” Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX vice president of Starlink and commercial sales, said during a panel at the World Satellite Business Week conference.

SpaceX sells consumer Starlink antennas, also known as user terminals, for $599 each. For more demanding Starlink customers – such as mobile, maritime, or aviation users – SpaceX sells antennas with its service in a range from $2,500 to $150,000 each.

A machine-learning algorithm demonstrated the capability to process data that exceeds a computer’s available memory by identifying a massive data set’s key features and dividing them into manageable batches that don’t choke computer hardware. Developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the algorithm set a world record for factorizing huge data sets during a test run on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit, the world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer.

Equally efficient on laptops and supercomputers, the highly scalable algorithm solves hardware bottlenecks that prevent processing information from data-rich applications in cancer research, satellite imagery, social media networks, national security science and earthquake research, to name just a few.

“We developed an ‘out-of-memory’ implementation of the non-negative matrix factorization method that allows you to factorize larger data sets than previously possible on a given hardware,” said Ismael Boureima, a computational physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Boureima is first author of the paper in The Journal of Supercomputing on the record-breaking algorithm.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office launched their newest space observation satellites today in a largely classified mission called “Silent Barker.”

The joint mission flew Sept. 10 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida. Once operational, the satellites will track objects — and potentially nefarious activities — within geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles above Earth.

“Working together, we’ve developed a system in a relatively short amount of time that is going to provide us with unprecedented coverage of what’s going on in the GEO belts,” NRO director Christopher Scolese told reporters during an Aug. 28 pre-launch briefing.

On Sept. 6, a new satellite left Earth; its mission is to tell us about the motions of hot plasma flows in the universe.

Launched from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite will detect X-ray wavelengths with unprecedented precision to peer into the hearts of galaxy clusters, reveal the workings of black holes and supernovae, as well as to tell us about the elemental makeup of the universe.

XRISM, pronounced “crism,” is a collaborative mission between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA, with participation by the European Space Agency.