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.

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!

Two high performance mircosatellites built by SSTL have entered their third year of in-orbit operations after delivering consistently outstanding results since their launch in October 2005.

Both satellites were designed and built by SSTL as Earth observation missions: Beijing-1 for China’s Beijing Landview Mapping Information Technology Ltd (BLMIT), and TopSat for British company QinetiQ on behalf of the UK Government.

These two missions represented a significant development in capability and performance of small satellites, providing 2.5m resolution imagery onboard TopSat, and 4m for Beijing-1. The high performance cameras were designed and built in the UK by Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) and Sira Optronics respectively. Both satellites are built with highly agile attitude control systems that provide accurate pointing to enable several independent images to be targeted in rapid succession.

Beijing-1 was launched into the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC), joining four other SSTL-built satellites for a multi-national consortium of owners. As well as contributing images to the DMC, the Chinese satellite is providing pollution and topography data to the Chinese government, much of which has been targeted at reducing pollutants in time for the 2008 Olympic Games to be hosted in the capital.

TopSat's primary mission objective was to demonstrate that a microsatellite could deliver responsive high-resolution imagery directly from a satellite to ground terminals within the same footprint. Having fulfilled its original objectives, the satellite is now available for commercial service under the TopSat Consortium: QinetiQ (who own the satellite), SSTL, RAL and Infoterra, all original partners in the mission.

Today, both satellites today share a common role in Low Earth Orbit, providing images for the International Charter: Space and Major Disasters, which is currently lead by SSTL’s subsidiary DMCii Ltd on behalf of the British National Space Centre (BNSC).

Just two years on, SSTL is developing the next generation DMC satellite for launch in 2009. The SSTL 300 platform will give users access to ever more demanding applications, including 10-metre PAN and 4-metre multi-spectral imaging and a throughput of more than 100 images per day.

Sira now forms SSTL’s Optical Payload Group, a 30-man team based at the company’s site in Sevenoaks UK, developing cutting-edge optics systems for space.

The DMC provide a unique Earth Observation resource that enables repeat daily imaging of anywhere in the world. Satellite owners contribute images, agreeing to provide 5% of their capacity free for daily imaging of disaster areas, whilst the majority of their capacity is available to support their independent imaging programs. This makes DMC membership particularly attractive to developing nations wishing to extend their reach without the prohibitive cost associated with larger satellites and “going it alone”.

DMCii Ltd coordinates the distribution and processing of the satellite image data.

The CHRIS (Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) Hyperspectral Mission, developed within SSTL's Optical Payload Group (OPG) in Sevenoaks has recently celebrated its 6th birthday.

The instrument is flying on what was ESA’s first small satellite, PROBA-1. The main purpose of the instrument is to provide images of land areas for science applications, CHRIS has lent its hand to many other weird and wonderful applications. These range from coastal and aerosol monitoring to crater spotting and reef detection (in turbid waters)! The Mission also supports the International Charter: Space and Major Disasters which DMCii is currently leading on behalf of the BNSC.

The more technical Space Blog reader will be interested to hear that the platform provides pointing in both across-track and along-track directions, for target acquisition and multi-angle observations, particularly important for canopy discrimination. The instrument covers a spectral range from 400nm to 1050nm, at least 11nm resolution with a minimum ground sampling interval of 17m. In this mode it is possible to read out 18 spectral bands. The locations and widths of the spectral bands are programmable. Selectable on-chip integration can increase the number of bands to 62 for a spatial sampling interval of 34m. The swath width imaged is 13km at perigee. This highly flexible instrument also has the ability to mimic the spectral setting of other instruments and this has been useful in acquiring the same band sets as the Spot and IRS instruments, a useful feature for its role in the International Charter.

The Mission continues to operate successfully even in its sixth year of operation and demonstrates the success of the mission and the utility of the instrument and platform. Currently, approximately 90 scientists are serviced by CHRIS with data from 200 sites in 40 counties around the globe. SSTL continues to provide, on a daily basis, the control of the instrument and the processing of the data sets.

Today SSTL issued a statement following the publication of “Galileo: Recent Developments" report and the ensuing debate about the future of Europe's planned satellite navigation system. It welcomes cost benefit analysis and most of all competition at all levels of the project.

SSTL's GIOVE-A remains the first and only satellite launched in the Galileo project. This small test satellite has demonstrated that other similar satellites could be completed in approximately two years at relatively low cost. GIOVE-A was completed on time and within budget and was launched at the end of 2005. It has been generating Galileo signals from space since early in 2006.

SSTL estimates the cost of building and launching a 12 satellite constellation to be approximately €600M. This compares favourably with other costs being floated and reflected in the committee’s report. In other words, a useful system could be put in place for a small fraction of the total cost for deployment mentioned in the report.

MPs have called for a review of Galileo and SSTL Business Development Manager Phil Davies has agreed with calls for review (see The Guardian). In fact, speaking on Radio 4's Today Program with guest Gwyneth Dunwoody on Monday, Davies reiterated the benefits of European involvement and stated that the prospect of a working satellite navigation system in the immediate future is entirely realistic. He also agreed with Dunwoody that a "flying pig" (gold trotters or not) approach to budgets was innappopriate and that the barrier to lower cost lies in the procurement process and not the technology.