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Category: satellites

An artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket during its ascent into orbit. Image Credit: Blue Origin.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has been selected by Canadian-based Telesat to send a fleet of satellites into orbit. The payload for these flights could help improve web services around the globe.

The satellites, designed to provide internet services across the globe, will be sent to low-Earth orbit by Texas-based Blue Origin’s New Glenn over the course of multiple launches.

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This is a horrible, horrible idea. The company wants to create a series of satellites that can unfurl, which will reflect light, and that can be manipulated to send messages to earth. The entire collection, comprised of CubeSats, will provide an area of about 50 sq. km. and create a whole new kind of orbital debris.

According to the website, “When phones don’t work, during zero visibility, power cuts and catastrophical emergencies – government can use the display for urgent notifications for the population.” We can ignore the idea of them being seen during zero visibility, but can you imagine a message floating in the sky that you can’t just turn off?

It was bound to happen.

While the rest of us look up at the night sky, and wonder at what we’re seeing, ponder how it all fits together, and strain ourselves trying to understand how our origins are intertwined with all that we see, others don’t. They look up at the magnitude of the night sky and think none of these things.

Instead they think, “Hmmm…that’s a big, empty billboard. How can I make money from it?”

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It was a good year for DOST-Philippines after it successfully launched two satellites under the Philippine Scientific Earth Observation Microsatellite (PHL-Microsat) program: Maya-1 the country’s first cube satellite measuring only 10 cubic centimeters in August, and Diwata-2, the improved version of both its predecessors in October.

Manila, August 10, 2018 — Cheers full of Filipino pride were heard in the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute building as officials from UP, the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), the Embassy of Japan in the Philippines, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) witnessed the live deployment of Maya-1, the Philippines’ first ever cube satellite (CubeSat).

After its turnover to JAXA last May 15, the Maya-1 CubeSat was brought to the International Space Station (ISS) through the SpaceX Falcon 9 CRS-15 on June 29. “This is actually our second major achievement in space science and technology,” said UP Diliman chancellor Michael Tan, looking back on the Diwata-1 microsatellite launch on March 23, 2016 from Cape Canaveral and its deployment from the ISS on April 27, 2016.

The development of Maya-1 falls under the BIRDS-2 (Birds Satellite Project), a cross-border interdisciplinary satellite project that accommodates non-space faring countries. The project consists of 11 participating team members from four different countries — Bhutan, Japan, Malaysia and the Philippines. The Philippines was represented throughout the project by two DOST scholars enrolled in graduate studies at the Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech) — Joven Javier from the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI) of the DOST and Adrian Salces of UP Diliman. Javier, in particular, was designated as Project Manager and led the multinational BIRDS-2 team in the development of the CubeSats.

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Missions like the Kepler Space Telescope and the newer Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have revealed thousands of exoplanets out there among the stars, but we know surprisingly little about them. To get up close and personal, we’re going to need extremely precise space telescopes. MIT scientists have proposed an innovative way to make sure those instruments remain calibrated and capable of peering at distant exoplanets. They suggest designers incorporate a smaller secondary satellite that can act as a “guide star” for the telescope.

Space researchers are anxious to get new super-sized telescopes in space because the equipment we have right now is only adept at finding planets and relaying basic information. Most exoplanets in the database were discovered via the transit method, which watches for dips in brightness as planets pass in front of their home stars. From this, we can often discern a planet’s size, orbit, and approximate temperature. To get detailed data about its atmosphere and composition, we need telescopes like the upcoming (and chronically delayed) James Webb Space Telescope.

Webb will offer much greater imaging prowess than Hubble because its primary mirror is larger, composed of 18 hexagonal segments with a total diameter of 6.5 meters. In the coming decades, space telescopes could reach 15 meters with as many as 100 mirror segments. Such telescopes would have a coronagraph, an instrument capable of separating the intense light of a star from the faint light of an exoplanet. If this measurement isn’t perfect, the telescope would be unable to resolve the details on a planet.

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Recent research from Stanford and Google has made the worst nightmare of some concerned with artificial intelligence (AI) all the more real. A machine learning agent was caught cheating by hiding information in “a nearly imperceptible, high-frequency signal.”

Clever, but also creepy.

The agent was instructed to turn aerial images into street maps and back again as part of research to improve Google’s process of turning satellite images into the widely used and relied upon Google Maps. The process involves CycleGAN, “a neural network that learns to transform images of type X and Y into one another, as efficiently yet accurately as possible.” Though the agent was performing this task quite well, it quickly became apparent that it was performing the task too well.

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For its 2018 finale, A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the U.S. Air Force’s first third-generation navigation satellite for the Global Positioning System (GPS 3–01) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Liftoff window begins at 8:51 a.m. EST (1351 GMT).

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On Tuesday morning SpaceX will attempt to launch what the company and the Air Force are calling an “historic” mission from Cape Canaveral.

The launch will be SpaceX’s first of a national security mission, carrying the first in a new generation of satellites modernizing the Global Positioning System.

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