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ORLANDO, Fla., Jan. 6 (UPI) — SpaceX kicked off a surge in launch activity Thursday with the successful launch of 49 of the company’s Starlink communications satellites from Florida, heading south along the state’s coastline.

Five SpaceX missions may launch in the next month on the southern polar trajectory, flying closer to the Florida coast toward Miami than most launches, according to the U.S. Space Force.

Continue reading “SpaceX successfully completes first launch of 2022 from Florida” »

What do you call a broken satellite?

Today, it’s a multimillion-dollar piece of dangerous space junk.

But a new collision-avoidance system developed by students at the University of Cincinnati is getting engineers closer to developing robots that can fix broken satellites or spacecraft in orbit.

Archaeologists have discovered a 4,500-year-old highway network in Saudi Arabia lined with well-preserved ancient tombs.

Researchers from the University of Western Australia have carried out a wide-ranging investigation over the past year, involving aerial surveys conducted by helicopter, ground survey and excavation and examination of satellite imagery.

In findings published in the Holocene journal in December, they said the “funerary avenues” spanning large distances in the northwestern Arabian counties of Al-‘Ula and Khaybar had received little examination until quite recently.

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation’s (SpaceX) ch8ef executive officer Mr. Elon Musk has shared the latest details for his company’s Starlink satellite internet constellation. Starlink is SpaceX’s internet service which uses low Earth orbit (LEO) small satellites to beam down the Internet to its users. Due to a rapid cadence of launches, SpaceX has ensured that Starlink is the world’s largest internet constellation in service, and the company is currently upgrading the satellites with laser based connectivity. This will allow Starlink to expand its coverage and reach areas that cannot be served without ground stations to connect the satellites and the users to internet servers.

Starlink Will Soon Start To Operate Laser Links Between Satellites Confirms Musk

Mr. Musk shared the latest details through his social media platform Twitter, as he outlined the number of Starlink satellites currently in orbit and his company’s plans to activate newer spacecraft capable of optical communication. These are crucial for evaluating the internet service’s current capacity, which has come under fire from rivals in proceedings for spectrum sharing and licensing currently underway at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

An international team of astronomers using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has detected a rocky planet, about half the mass of Earth, in an extraordinarily short 7.7-hour orbit around its parent star.

It’s a reminder that the science of extrasolar planet hunting seems to enter bizarro land with each new discovery. Planetary scientists still haven’t figured out how our own tiny Mercury — which orbits our Sun once every 88 days — actually formed and evolved. So, this iron-rich ultrashort-period (USP) planet, dubbed GJ 367b should really boggle their minds.

It’s completely rocky, unlike most previously detected gaseous hot Jupiters on extremely short stellar orbits. As a result, the tiny planet is estimated to have a surface with temperatures of 1,500 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt iron; hardly an Earth 2.0.

Continue reading “New sub-Jupiter-mass exoplanet detected by astronomers” »

It’s rare that faster can also equate to greener in the aerospace industry, but that’s the goal of Australian startup Hypersonix has in sight.

The company has developed a new hypersonic satellite launch system that will make launches more accessible and also more sustainable. The technology could one day also help develop hypersonic airliners capable of crossing the Atlantic in a little over an hour.

“At Mach 5 and above, friction caused by molecules flowing over the hypersonic aircraft can generate temperatures in excess of 2,000˚C (3,632˚F),” the company says in a press statement. “Suffice to say that Brisbane-based aerospace engineering start-up, Hypersonix Launch Systems, is choosing its materials to cope with these extremes.”

Elon Musk—via Starlink, a division of SpaceX—is in talks with “several” airlines to provide in-flight WiFi for passengers. His plan is to use Starlink’s ever-growing megaconstellation of satellites to equip customers with better WiFi while they fly the friendly skies.

Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink and commercial sales, gave out details on the ambitious plan during a panel at the Connected Aviation Intelligence Summit on Wednesday.

My Chapter Titled ‘’, has been published in ‘Handbook of Real-Time Computing’ in Springer Nature. The chapter provides information on satellite communication networks for different orbits, use-cases, scenarios, link budget analyses, history, and future developments.

Software-defined radio (SDR) is one of many new technologies being adopted by satellite communication to lower the costs both operational and capital by reducing the amount of radio equipment involved in the communication chain and by giving the advantage of remote configuration and regular firmware updates. SDR basically replaces most of the radio equipment by a single computing device with software capable of performing functions of the replaced hardware equipment. SDRs are introduced not only in terrestrial gateways and ground stations, but next generations of LEO and GEO satellites are already adopting the technology. Previously, satellite radio links were limited to the configuration of radio equipment that was installed during the manufacturing of the satellite, which couldn’t be modified throughout the lifespan of the satellite.

Figure 15 displays a generic digital communication transmit and receive RF chain at the physical layer for binary, sampled, and analogue data streams. Data in binary that is collected from data source at transmit end is coming from the higher layers, which is then coded in binary, modulated to sampled, converted to analogue waveform through digital to analogue converter before sending it to the antenna end for transmission over-the-air interface with required transmit power. At the receive end, the wireless signal is received as analogue, converted to sampled for demodulation, decoded to binary, and sent to data sink for integrating with upper layers. The coding/decoding and modulation/demodulation, commonly referred to as MOD/COD, are programmable functions and can be replaced by SDR using a processing device. This can be done at the ground stations, at the gateway, user terminals, and at the satellite using on-board processing.

This is interesting. It looks like SpaceX is abandoning their backup plan to launch V2.0 Starlink satellites with the Falcon 9 and instead they are going to launch them with Starship instead. They are also saying they will be ready to launch them as soon as 2 months from now. This confirms the rumors that I’ve been hearing that the Raptor 2 engine for Starship is much more stable than the Raptor 1 engines were.

Note that this means they are planning on launching satellites before they have perfected landing but this makes sense since they did the same with the Falcon 9, crashing and burning 19 rockets in a row until they were able to land part of one. It should take 5 or less orbital attempts to land the Starship booster stage. (They will lose a ton of engines with the booster stage so this will be a high priority to get working.)

TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX has dropped a plan to use Falcon 9 to launch the 30,000 satellites in its proposed second-generation Starlink broadband constellation, and is instead focusing on a configuration leveraging its upcoming Starship vehicle.

Continue reading “SpaceX goes all-in on Starship configuration for second-gen Starlink” »