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Category: satellites

Wifi distribution across this planet is patchwork of crazy: You can tweet from Mt. Fuji but lord help you if you want to send an email in Cuba. Thursday, Israeli company SkyFi announced it will be the one to finally soak the world in wifi from space.

In a press release announcing $3 million in funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners and the Liberty Israel Venture Fund, the company said it would get around the problems preventing reliable wifi from traditional satellites by launching nano satellites whose 55-centimeter diameter antenna could be folded up to make launching cheaper, then expanding once in orbit.

“The high flexibility of our nano satellites and the ability to provide multiple services to different customers enables us to offer free internet access to the whole planet in the same manner as GPS services are free. We think this has the potential to bridge great divides and give everyone worldwide a part in the great global connected community,” Raz Itzhaki Tamir, Co-Founder and CEO of SkyFi, said in the press announcement.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=W0YgV1TgnF8

“We think the only way to effectively connect people all over the world is through satellites.”

Israel-Flag-Small Gedalyah Reback 23 hours ago.

There’s been much ado about getting internet to the world’s disaffected and disconnected populations. Large swathes of rural and underdeveloped areas of Asia, Africa and somewhat in Latin America have garnered the attention of Silicon Valley’s biggest superpowers Google and Facebook.

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Satellites and spacecraft are generally complex to build on the ground, expensive to launch and obsolete in a decade or less.

These objects end up floating in orbit around the planet contributing to the pollution surrounding the Earth. But what if there was an alternative?

That’s the question David Barnhart, director of USC’s Space Engineering Research Center and lead for the Space Systems and Technology group for the USC Information Sciences Institute, is contemplating. What if we could just “grow” spacecraft, repurpose a hybrid of inorganic and organic materials and even allow food to grow in space?

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TAQNIA and KACST signed an agreement on February 21, 2016, to form a joint venture that will be responsible for developing six or more sub-meter resolution imaging satellites.

KACST will construct, integrate, and launch the satellites, and it will own 50% of the satellites’ imaging capacity inside of KACST’s communication cone, which includes Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region. And, DigitalGlobe will have rights to the other 50% of the capacity inside this region and 100% of the satellites’ capacity outside of the region.

WESTMINSTER, Colo.–()– DigitalGlobe, Inc. (NYSE: DGI), the global leader in earth imagery and information about our changing planet, today announced the formation of a joint venture with TAQNIA, a firm dedicated to accelerating technology development for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in partnership with KACST to develop a constellation of highly capable small imaging satellites to support the needs of customers around the world.

DigitalGlobe and TAQNIA and KACST signed an agreement on February 21, 2016, to form a joint venture that will be responsible for developing six or more sub-meter resolution imaging satellites. The small satellites are expected to be capable of collecting imagery with anticipated 80 cm resolution and will leverage DigitalGlobe’s industry-leading ground infrastructure. TAQNIA and KACST will benefit from DigitalGlobe’s imagery production platform and expertise and massive catalog of high-resolution, high-accuracy imagery, which will improve the native accuracy of the small satellite imagery. TAQNIA and KACST will also benefit from DigitalGlobe’s global distribution capability and existing customer relationships with the world’s largest buyers of commercial satellite imagery and geospatial information.

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Japan is studying the black holes.

This week the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched a new space observatory designed to study black holes, dying stars and the history of galaxy clusters. The X-ray Astronomy Satellite, known as ASTRO-H, will be able to detect X-rays more than 10 times fainter than its telescope predecessor, Suzaku.

ASTRO-H was launched on the Japanese launch vehicle H-IIA from Tanegashima Launch Center on Wednesday, February 17th at 3:45 am EST. Within hours, the satellite deployed its solar arrays and was functioning normally.

It’s tradition for Japan’s astronomy satellites to be given a provisional name before launch and be renamed once they’re in orbit. After its successful launch, JAXA announced ASTRO-H was renamed to Hitomi, a Japanese word that refers to an eye’s pupil, which is like an aperture collecting light for an eye.

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Nano Satellite could be interesting and even expanded upon especially as we look to expand the usage of Quantum Technology across various wireless devices in the future as well as microbot technology to enable connectivity to the cloud and other wireless devices.

The nano-satellite, which is among ISRO’s important missions, will monitor air pollutants that pollute cities including Delhi, Lucknow, Amritsar and Allahabad.

The nano-satellite will weigh 15kg and placed 500 km above the earth.

SAC director Tapan Misra told ET the mission is designed to cover, each day, up to 50,000 sq km area of the country’s 32.87 lakh sq km.

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Satellites in outer space will soon provide broadband internet to some remote regions of the world, thanks to a company called ViaSat, in partnership with Boeing.

By 2019, three ViaSat satellites will dispatch a whopping one-terabit internet connection to obscure residential areas in the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. They will also provide connectivity to airplanes in flight and even maritime vessels in the middle of the oceans, which have always previously been drastically removed from anything approaching broadband.

Presently in development at Boeing, ViaSat’s three-satellite system will reportedly offer double the capacity of all the 400 communications satellites already in orbit around the Earth combined. It’s existing technology, just re-executed to be way more efficient.

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GPS is an utterly pervasive and wonderful technology, but it’s increasingly not accurate enough for modern demands. Now a team of researchers can make it accurate right down to an inch.

Regular GPS registers your location and velocity by measuring the time it takes to receive signals from four or more satellites, that were sent into space by the military. Alone, it can tell you where you are to within 30 feet. More recently a technique called Differential GPS (DGPS) improved on that resolution by adding ground-based reference stations—increasing accuracy to within 3 feet.

Now, a team from the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that augments the regular GPS data with on-board inertial measurements from a sensor. Actually, that’s been tried before, but in the past it’s required large computers to combine the two data streams, rendering it ineffective for use in cars or mobile devices. Instead what the University of California team has done is create a set of new algorithms which, it claims, reduce the complexity of the calculation by several order of magnitude.

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ViaSat plans to launch three satellites to provide 1 terabit per second internet connections to remote areas, aircraft, and maritime vehicles.

ViaSat, a US-based satellite company, has teamed up with Boeing to build three new satellites that will provide high-speed Internet to remote areas around the world. This joint project was announced two days ago. ViaSat is scheduled to launch its satellite ViaSat2 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in just a few months.

These three new satellites, named ViaSat3, will be carrying a total network capacity of a whopping 1 Terabit per second, triple the capacity of ViaSat2. It will be able to deliver 100 Mbps service to remote residential areas in the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

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