It’s been a few months since our blog about the Engineering Education Scheme (EES) The aim of the scheme is to provide students aged 16 and 17 with experience in engineering, science and technology in order to make informed decisions about their future education and career.

The students from Farnborough 6th Form College are investigating ways to detect signals in space that offer a precursor to earthquakes. In this respect, it also has something in common with the POISE space experiment that SSTL helped students to develop on behalf of the British National Space Centre (BNSC).

In January, despite the unusually heavy snow the students managed to attend a two day workshop at Surrey University. The team had done some broad research into the field, but still had not decided on which technology(s) would be most appropriate for detecting precursors to earthquakes.

Within the first day, they had decided on a combination of a topside sounder that would measure ion concentration in the ionosphere from above, and an infrared camera which has also shown some promising results for earthquake detection. The rest of the time, the team concentrated on building a half-scale model of a Disaster Monitoring Constellation type spacecraft to be used for display purposes.

SSTL’s David Sanderson has been visiting the team roughly every two weeks after work to provide supervision and mentoring. Their model is now certainly looking the part (see photo above) and the team is preparing their report for assessment and celebrations in April.

Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits on the Moon near its north pole.

This is exciting news the World over because water is a key factor in the ability of an extra terrestrial environment to support life. The SSTL team is also watching with great interest because the payload is controlled by a specially built on-board computer (OBC) built by its team in Guildford - its first to be flown onboard a lunar mission. The OBC is programmed to control the instrument and to store the payload data which is then beamed back to the astounded NASA scientists on Earth.

NASA's Mini-SAR instrument found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to 15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.

Continue reading "Chandrayaan-1 finds water on the Moon"

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"