SSTL and its US operation SST US are attending the Satellite 2010 exhibition at National Harbor, Maryland, USA from 16-18 March 2010.

Visit Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd on stand 1925.

SST US CEO John Paffett will be joined by Kathryn O'Donnell, Yasrine Ibnyahya and Simon Crouch from SSTL and Brent Abbott, Becky Yoder and Katherine Defoe from SST US.

Come and find out about how we deliver low risk high performance satellites at a fraction of the price usually associated with such levels of capability.

Twenty six years ago today the University of Surrey team led by future SSTL-founder Sir Martin Sweeting launched the UoSAT-2 satellite (a.k.a UO-11) onboard a Delta rocket with LandSat-D from Vandenberg Air Force Base, USA on the 1st March 1984.

The 60kg small satellite was built in just 6 months and carried a Digitalker speech synthesiser and experiments including magnetometers, a CCD camera, a Geiger-Müller tube and a microphone to detect micrometeoroid impacts.

UoSAT-2 was instrumental in providing a communications link from the Canadian-Soviet Ski-Trek support teams to the expedition party in 1986. The position of the skiers' emergency beacon was calculated daily by Cospas-Sarsat ground stations and relayed to them and thousands of amateur radio listeners as a spoken message from the Digitalker on board UO-11. This is really worth a listen - visit the expedition web page. The message could also serve as an emergency channel to the skiers in the event that all other radio links failed.

Continue reading "UoSAT-2 transmitting for 26 years"

Small satellite pioneer and all round British space innovator SSTL will star in next week’s episode of The Gadget Show on the UK’s Five television channel at 8pm on the 8th March.

Of course the exact details of the program are top secret, but presenters Ortis Deley and Suzi Perry will attempt to locate fellow presenter Jon Bentley using satellite technology. If you want to find out more, you’ll just have to tune in.

Continue reading "SSTL on The Gadget Show"

Sir Martin Sweeting :

So President Obama has scrapped the US plans for a manned return to the Moon. As the world claws it way out of recession, many might see this decision as being financially prudent. However, the exploration of the lunar surface is still very much on the agenda. But it won’t be man making one small step next time, it will be a robot!

Several nations are planning robotic lunar missions including India, China, Korea and interestingly, the USA. And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense because robotic lunar missions are much more cost effective than manned missions, although not so emotive. Of course, robotic exploration is nothing new with NASA and ESA both utilising this technology, but it’s still very expensive. The price tag for the European ExoMars programme is around €1Bn which is a lot of money in any currency. But does robotic exploration have to be this expensive?

At SSTL we don’t think so. We think it is possible to knock a “0” off the cost of mounting lunar robotic exploration mission by simply employing the same, well founded, production techniques that SSTL use to reduce the cost of designing and building Earth-orbiting small satellites.

Currently, there is enormous interest in the moon, particularly with the prospect of finding water, the key perhaps to a permanent manned lunar base in the future. The LRO and LCROSS missions are currently surveying the lunar surface to identify future landing sites. Now is the time to mount a low cost robotic mission to Moon in order to prove the technology and its suitability for other more distant planetary missions.