March 2015
Congested, contested, and invested: of space debris, risky launches and private initiative
... 2,290 kg of cargo bound for the ISS, as well as 26 small satellites from commercial remote sensing company Planet Labs. While disappointment followed the accident, one theme resonated loudly: launch is a risky business. Even if the launch...
March 2015
Chasing comets together: the Vega project in the USSR and beyond
... the distance, speed and angle coordinates using the largebase radio interferometry method was needed. Our lab prepared this experiment as part of the project, working together with our colleagues from Lavochkin RDC, the...
March 2015
A boom and a (possible) bust in small spacecraft production
...: from providing data to the operators to full vertical integration within the company. New players, such as Planet Labs, Dauria Aerospace and the aforementioned Skybox Imaging are competing with operators such as Digital Globe, and...
June 2015
Lunar Mission One: crowdfunding endeavour and drilling on the Moon
... project. Inspired by unconventional ventures such as the MIT Management School’s ‘We Are Smarter than Me’, our Lunar Missions Labs will encourage creative online workshops where anyone, anywhere in the world, will be able to collaborate with others...
June 2015
Finding asteroids before they find us
... Planet Center of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory who will then send their findings to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA for analysis. Then the data will be made public. We are at the beginning of a new era, where...
October 2015
Finding Earth-like worlds: the tale of how Kepler-452b was discovered
... at a time when this mission was only a proposal concept. We spent the first six years or so simply doing lab-based demos to prove that we could actually achieve the photometric precision necessary with our instruments and...
