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Category: satellites

A startup with a new type of spacecraft propulsion system could make the interplanetary travel seen in Star Trek a reality. Magdrive has just closed a £1.4M seed round led by Founders Fund, an early investor in SpaceX, backed by Luminous Ventures, 7percent Ventures, and Entrepreneur First.

Magdrive is developing a next generation of spacecraft propulsion for small satellites. The startup says its engine’s thrust and efficiency are a “generational leap” ahead of any other electrical thrusters, opening up the space industry to completely new types of missions that were not possible before, without resorting to much larger, expensive and heavier chemical thrusters. It says its engine would make fast and affordable interplanetary space travel possible, as well as operations in Very Low Earth orbit. The engine would also make orbital manufacturing far more possible than previously.

Existing electrical solutions are very efficient but have very low thrust. Chemical thrusters have high thrust but lack efficiency and are hazardous and expensive to handle. Magdrive says its engine can deliver both high thrust and high efficiency in one system.

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The satellites Blue Canyon developed for DARPA’s Blackjack program — based on the company’s commercial X-SAT bus — passed a critical design review.

WASHINGTON — Small satellite manufacturer Blue Canyon Technologies has been cleared to produce its first two satellites for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Blackjack program, the company announced Dec. 14.

DARPA plans to deploy up to 20 spacecraft in low-Earth orbit that will be connected by optical inter-satellite links and provide communications, missile tracking and navigation services.

Blue Canyon in July won a $14.1 million contract to manufacture four satellites, with options worth $99 million for up to 20 satellites.

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National Geographic magazines and Indiana Jones movies might have you picturing archaeologists excavating near Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and Machu Picchu. And some of us do work at these famous places.

But archaeologists like us want to learn about how people from the past lived all over the planet.

We rely on left-behind artifacts to help fill out that picture. We need to excavate in places where there’s evidence of human activity – those clues from the past aren’t always as obvious as a giant pyramid, though.

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We all have images in our mind of rocket launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station hurtling astronauts into space and satellites into orbit.

But those launches may be a thing of the past as a new generation of drones that can do the same job cheaper, safer and better steps into play.

Alabama-Based Aevum unveiled its Ravn X Autonomous Launch Vehicle Wednesday that it says is the world’s largest unmanned aircraft system.

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Radar and LiDAR have been incredibly quick and effective tools for mapping and surveying the Earth’s surface from aircraft and satellites, but while they can deliver accurate readings through cloud and even forest canopy cover, they can’t tell you what’s below the surface of the sea. Seawater absorbs far too much of the signal.

Sonar remains the most effective way to map out the sea floor – but the vast majority of the oceans that form 70 percent of the Earth’s surface remain unmapped, because sonic waves have hitherto only been able to be sent out from underwater. Sound waves sent from air into water lose more than 99.9 percent of their energy in the translation; it’s why the outside world goes so wonderfully silent when you dive down to the bottom of the pool. The meagre remaining 0.1 percent of the energy does create a sonar signal, but that loses a further 99.9 percent of its energy upon coming back up from the water into the air.

Sonar is commonly used for submarine detection, among other things, by military forces the world over, chiefly using devices on the undersides of ships. But the closest things thus far to an airborne sonar system are “dippers” like Thales’ FLASH system; low-frequency, wide-band sonar systems that dangle from cables out the bottom of helicopters and dip into the sea below like noisy teabags. These methods are slow, expensive, and no good at covering large areas.

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Global #connectivity lets for #digitalidentity for billions of people worldwide, giving them access to #telehealth, #education, #careers, #entertainment and #finance services, as well as raising #cybersecurity and #dataprivacy concernsRe-sharing. Starlink can help telemedicine become more reliable and available to people in need. Especially those in rurual or far flung locations.

Video Source/Credit: SpaceX Youtube Channel

One interesting sub-division of SpaceX is Starlink, which is Musk’s venture into increasing global connectivity. Starlink’s mission is to use a global network of low Earth orbit satellites to eventually “deliver high speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable.” While satellite internet itself is not a novel concept, most of the traditional systems use dated technology that have far less capabilities with regards to internet speed, connectivity, and sustainability. Starlink’s goal is to provide high-speed broadband internet, using cutting-edge satellite systems that will also not add to the space pollution created by traditional systems. As of now, the company states that it “is targeting service in the Northern U.S. and Canada in 2020, rapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021.”

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