Leading small satellite mission provider SSTL, has been recognised as one of the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For, and the only space industry company to make the listing.

SSTL ranked 89 out of the 997 companies that took part, with staff giving a top 20 score to finding their work stimulating, saying that they feel proud to be working for the world’s leading provider of small satellite missions.

Susan Jason, who's been with SSTL for 10 years explained the appeal of the British space innovators

There are lots of techie, geeky, space enthusiasts here. We have healthy, fiery debates. It’s amazing being able to contribute to such an important area.”

The survey showed that people go out of their way to help each other, with colleagues fun to work with and supportive - another top 20 score. SSTL was also recognised as a 1* (First Class) Best Companies To Work for the third year running.

Professor Sir Martin Sweeting, Group Chairman and founder of SSTL has been instrumental in fostering this unique working environment

Since SSTL’s formation in 1985, highly motivated people have been the company’s most important asset. The innovation and total commitment that our staff bring to each and every project, enables us to satisfy our customers in a technically demanding field. We reflect this view in striving to make SSTL the very best place to work

Jackie Orme, Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development,, said:

Being a Best Company to Work For is not just about prestigious listings and names up in lights. Engaged staff understand when times are tough and will respond by going the extra mile. Their companies will be the ones best placed to emerge strongly in a recovery.

Time Magazine has selected Bundle Protocol testing and the download of an image of the Cape of Good Hope from UK-DMC as one of the ten best inventions of 2008.

In September, a satellite used the new protocol to relay an image of the Cape of Good Hope back to Earth.

The "Orbital Internet" discussed in this award report is enabled by the cooperation around CLEO - a Cisco router in low Earth orbit onboard the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) satellite, UK-DMC. Lloyd Wood developed this idea from the CLEO project with the support of Cisco Systems Space team, NASA Glenn Research Center and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd at the University of Surrey.

This is not the first award that those involved with CLEO have won for its pioneering work in breaking the final frontier of Internet domination, which includes the Times Higher Education Supplement award 2006 and Computerworld awards.

For this test the Bundle Protocol was implemented by reusing the ground-based testbed built for CLEO. NASA Glenn originally relied on this testbed for preparing the in-orbit CLEO router for use in the satelite environment, but it is now used to develop code for UK-DMC's onboard computers.

The Cape of Good Hope image was downloaded in these experiments by carrying it in the Bundle Protocol over Saratoga. The Bundle Protocol, developed by the Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group, is considered a leading candidate for creating the Interplanetary Internet. Saratoga is a fast file transfer protocol for hop-by-hop transfers on privately-owned networks - including the intermittently-connected networks used for delay-tolerant networking.

Find out more about the Internet in Orbit and this work leading to this award on the Bundle Protocol tests page.

Each year the French Academy of Air and Space awards its Grand Prize in recognition of a “person or a team, European or international, who stands out because of a high-quality scientific, technical or cultural action concerning aerospace, by contributing to or helping spread new knowledge.” The Academy has awarded this year’s Silver medal to SSTL founder and Group Executive Chariman Sir Martin Sweeting.

The Grand Prize award ceremony was held on November 23, 2007 during the Academy’s annual assembly in the “Salle des Illustres” at the Place du Capitole, Toulouse.

Mr Jean Broquet, former Technical Director of EADS Astrium, France, received the award on behalf of Martin during the open session of Air and Space Academy on Friday Nov 23rd at Toulouse. The presentation of Martin's achievements and successes was made by Gérard Brachet former head of CNES and currently Vice President of the Academy. He gave a general view of Martin's activities and of his pioneer role and he pointed out, in particular, the major role of SSTL for securing the frequency slots allocated to Galileo, with GIOVE-A.

Jean Broquet had the opportunity to say few words including a reference to Martin's colleagues of both SSTL and Surrey Space Centre (SSC) for their contribution to the SSTL missions.

Last week at the Royal Aeronautical Society awards ceremony , the team responsible for the successful TopSat Earth observation mission, was awarded the Society's Silver Medal.

TopSat was developed for the MOD and BNSC by QinetiQ, SSTL, RAL and Infoterra and has been collecting tactical 3m imagery of the Earth for more than two years, setting a new world record for "resolution per mass of satellite". The engineering model is now on display in the Science Museum.

The award was accepted on behalf of the TopSat team by Dr Stuart Eves, the godfather of the programme, and Jenny Harding, SSTL's Projects Director who managed the programme.

This is the fourth Royal Aeronautical Society award won by SSTL staff this year. The team responsible for GIOVE-A received the Team Silver Award as well as the Geoffrey Pardoe Space Award, whilst Dr Mike Cutter was awarded the Society's Bronze Award for the design and manufacture of the CHRIS optical imaging system.

TopSat launched was launched in 2005. The small satellite'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.