SARAL; SAPPHIRE; NEOSSat; 3 cubesat - PSLV-CA C20 - 25.02.2013 12:31 UTC

[Space Alien]

[bavv]

http://webcast.gov.in/live/

[DMLL]

Студенты молодцы. Пришли, посмотрели, похлопали, отметили и вперед к новым победам

[DMLL]

Желающие могут вновь перенестись к началу космической эпохи.
"бип-бип" на частоте 437.450 МГц.

[Salo]

http://www.isro.org/pslv-c20/Imagegallery/launchvehicle.aspx

[Salo]

[Salo]

http://www.zarya.info/blog/?p=646

[Salo]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1302/25pslv/#.USvCODe55eE

Ocean monitor, smartphone satellite launched from India
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: February 25, 2013

India's workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifted seven satellites into orbit Monday, bolstering global ocean research, space surveillance, and taking miniature technology to new heights.

The 145-foot-tall rocket blasted off at 1231 GMT (7:31 a.m. EST) from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India's east coast, wh ere it was 6:01 p.m. local time.

The expendable four-stage launcher climbed into a sun-splashed evening sky, initially flying southeast over the Bay of Bengal, and then turning south to bypass Sri Lanka and ascend into space over the Indian Ocean.

The four-stage PSLV launched in a "core-alone" configuration without the assistance of strap-on boosters.

The mission's seven payloads were deployed in orbit 490 miles above Earth in less than 22 minutes, wrapping up the PSLV's 23rd mission and its 19th success in a row.

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Indian President Pranab Mukherjee was in the launch control center, observing the launch and congratulating the Indian Space Research Organization on the success.

"The PSLV has become a household name in our country, and this mission will only reaffirm this position with its accuracy [and] reliability," Mukherjee said. "Our launch capabilities have been widely recognized all over the world with ISRO increasingly launching satellites from other countries."

Among the rocket's passengers: The first asteroid-hunting satellite, a French-Indian ocean research craft, a small spacecraft built around a smartphone, a Canadian space surveillance satellite, two Austrian mini-telescopes, and a CubeSat built by students in Denmark.

The 900-pound SARAL satellite, equipped with a Ka-band altimeter to measure the height of ocean waves, separated first from the Indian booster and unfurled its solar panels moments later.

Jointly developed by France and India, the SARAL mission will bounce radar waves off ocean and ice surfaces to measure topography, pulling back the curtain on ocean circulation and giving scientists insights into its role in global climate.


Artist's concept of the SARAL satellite in orbit. Credit: CNES
 
The radar signal will measure the height of waves with an accuracy of just a few inches, a feat similar to measuring the thickness of paper lying on the ground from the top of a skyscraper, according to scientists.

SARAL's Ka-band antenna, built by Thales Alenia Space and funded by France, will be activated Tuesday and immediately begin collecting data, but the system will not be fully operational until spring, when SARAL reaches its final orbit and engineers declare the instrument healthy, according to Pierre Sengenes, the mission's project manager at CNES, the French space agency.

France's investment in SARAL was about $126 million, Sengenes told Spaceflight Now. India's budget for SARAL, which covered the satellite bus and launcher, was not disclosed.

SARAL joins the U.S.-French Jason 2 satellite, which also measures ocean topography from orbit.

But SARAL flies in a different orbit than Jason 2, which launched in 2008. And SARAL's high-frequency Ka-band radar offers twice the spatial resolution of Jason 2's altimeter, giving researchers better data in coastal zones.

"The type of data collected by SARAL will be exactly the same as Jason 2," said Amandine Guillot, SARAL project scientist at CNES. "But we can mention that thanks to its inclination, SARAL will collect data over ice sheets."

Sea-surface terrain can be used to chart currents, water temperatures, tides, and ocean eddies, scientists say.

Forecasters use ocean topography data in computer models predicting weather and climate on time scales ranging from a few days to more than a year.

SARAL also carries a communications package named ARGOS to collect observations from a network of ocean buoys and ground stations providing in situ data on wave height, period, water and air temperature, and other conditions.

Six smaller satellites rode the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle as secondary payloads.

Canada's NEOSSat satellite is the first space telescope designed to search for hazardous Earth-crossing asteroids.


Artist's concept of the NEOSSat satellite in orbit. Credit: University of Calgary
 
The $24 million NEOSSat mission will scan the sky for asteroids lurking near Earth, including objects orbiting close to the sun, making their discoveries challenging for traditional ground-based telescopes.

Engineers outfitted the suitcase-sized satellite with a baffle to allow the telescope to point closer to the sun than other observatories. Astronomers will try to pick out asteroids as they streak through a matrix of stars, potentially detecting up to a dozen 500-meter, or 1,640-foot, asteroids each month, plus scores of smaller objects.

You can find more details on NEOSSat in our complete story on the mission.

Canada's $65 million Sapphire satellite was also aboard the PSLV for Monday's launch.

Sapphire is Canada's first operational military satellite, and its optical telescope will track other satellites orbiting Earth at higher altitudes, including objects in geosynchronous orbit.

The 326-pound spacecraft was built by Surrey Satellite Technologies Ltd. under the authority of MDA Corp., Sapphire's prime contractor.

The Canadian Department of National Defence plans to share Sapphire's tracking data with the U.S. Air Force, which monitors all objects in orbit.


Artist's concept of the Sapphire satellite in orbit. Credit: MDA Corp.
 
Another satellite on Monday's launch was the 9.4-pound STRaND 1 triple-CubeSat, a tiny spacecraft with lofty goals.

STRaND 1 is the world's first satellite with a smartphone-based computer. Engineers plan to switch on the satellite's Google Nexus One smartphone later in the mission to demonstrate the low-cost, off-the-shelf system can control a satellite in space.

Two small Austrian satellites, billed as the smallest space telescopes ever launched, will study the brightest stars in the sky with 10 times the precision of ground-based observatories, according to mission officials.

Named BRITE-Austria and UniBRITE, the satellites are about the size of a toaster oven and were developed with the help of engineers at the University of Toronto.

Students from Aalborg University in Denmark assembled a CubeSat named AAUSAT 3 with two ship tracking receivers to help monitor marine traffic, particularly in a region near Greenland.

[instml]

February 25, 2013

Honourable President of India Witnesses the Successful Launch of Seven Satellites onboard PSLV-C20

ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, PSLV-C20, successfully launched the joint Indo-French Satellite, SARAL, today (February 25, 2013) in its twenty third flight fr om Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota. Six other satellites, namely, UNIBRITE (NLS 8.1) and BRITE (NLS 8.2) from Austria, SAPPHIRE and NEOSSAT from Canada, AAUSAT-3 (NLS 8.3) from Denmark; and STRaND-1 from the United Kingdom, have also been launched into their planned orbits along with SARAL.

Honourable President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee along with the Governor of Andhra Pradesh, Shri E. S. L. Narasimhan, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Shri N Kiran Kumar Reddy, Minister of State (Prime Minister's Office), Shri V Narayanasamy and other dignitaries from the Government of Andhra Pradesh witnessed the launch from the state-of-the-art Mission Control Centre of SDSC. Honourable President, in his post launch remarks, congratulated the scientists and engineers of ISRO for the successful launch.

At the completion of the countdown, PSLV-C20 lifted off from the First Launch Pad at SDSC SHAR, at 1801 hrs (IST) with the ignition of the first stage of the launch vehicle. The important flight events, namely, stage ignitions, heat-shield separation, stage separations and satellite injections took place exactly as planned.

After a flight of 17 minutes 55 seconds, the main payload, SARAL, weighing 407 kg was injected to an orbit very close to the intended orbit. Following this, the six auxiliary satellites were also successfully injected.

This has been the twenty second successive successful launch of ISRO's workhorse launch vehicle PSLV. Since its first successful launch in 1994, PSLV has launched 27 Indian satellites and 35 satellites for customers from abroad, including the satellites launched today. It has also launched India's geosynchronous satellites, Kalpana-1 and GSAT-12, thereby proving its versatility. PSLV also launched India's first spacecraft mission to moon, Chandrayaan-1, in 2008. It is scheduled to launch India's first interplanetary mission, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft, by the end of this year.

Satellite with Argos and Altika (SARAL) is an oceanographic satellite jointly developed by ISRO and the French Space Agency CNES. The satellite is built by ISRO, wh ereas CNES contributed the ARGOS and ALTIKA payloads. Data from SARAL will be useful for researchers besides having many practical applications like marine meteorology and sea state forecasting, climate monitoring, continental ice studies, environmental monitoring, protection of biodiversity and improvement in maritime security.

ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bangalore took over the SARAL's monitoring and control operations immediately after its injection. Following the automatic deployment of SARAL's solar panels, shortly after reaching orbit, all the subsequent operations are proceeding normally.

http://isro.org/pressrelease/scripts/pressreleasein.aspx?Feb25_2013

[Salo]

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/02/pslv-launch-multi-sats/

Indian PSLV successfully lofts multiple satellites
February 25, 2013 by William Graham

India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle made its 23rd flight on Monday, carrying seven satellites into sun-synchronous orbit including Austria's first satellite. Liftoff from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre was marked at 12:31 UTC (18:01 local time).

[Salo]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1302/26strand1/#.US4cwPkz8qE

Smartphone satellite calls home from final frontier
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: February 26, 2013

Soaring 500 miles above Earth, a tiny British satellite built around a commercial smartphone was calling back to Earth on Tuesday, one day after launching fr om India.


Animation of the smartphone satellite. Credit: SSTL
 
 

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But the satellite's biggest test is still to come, when engineers will switch its operating system to the Google Nexus One smartphone at the heart of the 9.4-pound miniature spacecraft.

For now, the STRaND 1 satellite is running on a standard computer system. It will next be transitioned to a Linux-based high-speed processor and once engineers are comfortable with the satellite's performance, they will turn over control of the spacecraft to the smartphone computer.

"We won't switch to the phone until all the satellite's own systems are all checked and working nominally," said Joelle Sykes, a spokesperson with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., the UK-based manufacturer of the STRaND 1 satellite. "Then the phone's health gets checked out before we can switch any [operations] to it."

Officials with SSTL and the Surrey Space Center expect the commissioning phase to last about two weeks.

"STRaND-1 from SSC and SSTL is an example of the real synergy of academic research linked to commercial development and exploitation that is the hallmark of Surrey," said Martin Sweeting, director of the Surrey Space Center and executive chairman of SSTL, in a statement. "This mission is a fantastic achievement and a great tribute to the hard work of the engineers involved. The UK's first nanosatellite SNAP 1, also built by SSC and SSTL and launched in 2000, was the world's most advanced nanosatellite at the time - STRaND-1 continues that story with the latest technologies available to us in 2013."

Based on the popular CubeSat design, the satellite is about the size of a household toaster oven, but engineers packed the tiny spacecraft with pulsed plasma thrusters and an experimental water-alcohol propulsion system - both first-time payloads on a nanosatellite - to remove STRaND 1 from orbit at the end of its mission.

Surrey engineers started working on their project in their free time in 2011, and technicians assembled the satellite in just three months beginning in late 2012.


Photo of the STRaND 1 satellite assembled before launch. Credit: SSTL
 
 Although officials have not divulged the exact cost of the project, Sykes said the cost was comparable to that of a family-sized car.

Smartphones have flown in space before inside the International Space Station, and the computer from a PDA launched inside two Japanese CubeSats in 2006 and 2008.

But STRaND 1 will go a step further.

The Nexus One's Android operating system will take over most of the satellite's control functions, testing the phone's ruggedness in one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable.

Engineers beefed up the phone with radiation shielding, and designers took precautions to keep the phone's battery from getting too cold in space.

"A smartphone on a satellite like this has never been launched before but our tests have been pretty thorough, subjecting the phone to oven and freezer temperatures, to a vacuum and blasting it with radiation," said Chris Bridges, Surrey's lead engineer on the project. "It has a good chance of working as it should, but you can never make true design evolutions or foster innovation without taking a few risks. STRaND is cool because it allows us to do just that."

The phone is mounted on a panel inside the satellite, with its camera aligned with a hole to take pictures of Earth.

STRaND 1 also features what Surrey engineers claim is the first 3D printed component to fly in space.

Applications installed on the smartphone will help control the satellite, collect scientific data and try to boost interest in space exploration.

The apps were sel ected in a Facebook competition last year:
The Scream in Space app was developed by Cambridge University Space Flight and will make full use of the smartphone's speakers. Testing the theory "in space no one can hear you scream," made popular in the 1979 film "Alien," the app will play videos of the best screams while in orbit, and the screams will be recorded using the smartphone's own microphone.

iTesa will record the magnitude of the magnetic field around the phone in orbit. Used as a precursor to further scientific studies, such as detecting Alfven waves - magnetic oscillations in our upper atmosphere - the iTEsa app could provide proof of principle.

The STRAND Data app will show satellite telemetry on the smartphone's display, which can be imaged by an additional camera on-board. This will enable new graphical telemetry to interpret trends.

The 360 app will take images using the smartphone's camera and use the technology onboard the spacecraft to establish STRaND-1's position. The public will be able to request their own unique satellite image of Earth through the website, wh ere images can be seen on a map showing wh ere they have been acquired.

Amateur radio operators can listen to STRaND 1's signal as it goes overhead. Learn how to listen here.

NASA's answer to STRaND 1, named PhoneSat, will launch this spring. Three PhoneSats, all using Android operating systems, are slated to fly together on the first mission of the Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket.

Surrey engineers are already working on a follow-up mission named STRaND 2. It will test the ability of two CubeSats to dock together in orbit using technology from Microsoft Xbox Kinect game controllers providing three-dimensional spatial awareness.

[instml]

SARAL/AltiKa LATEST NEWS
                             

08/03/2013

News about SARAL after its launch SARAL satellite was successfully put in orbitby the ISRO indian launcher PSLV on February 25, 2013 at 12h49 UT (13h 49 French time) on an orbit very close to the targeted injection orbit. Instruments switch ON and nominal functioning  After switching on the main sub-systems of the SSB platform developed by ISRO, the PIM equipments (Payload Integrated Module developed by CNES) have one after the other been turned ON during the night (Indian hour) between February 25 and 26, 2013. All the instruments are nominal. The attitude acquisition is still underway  The attitude acquisition maneuvers begun on 02/27 (inclination/local time correction) and are followed by semi-major axis correction maneuvers. The final orbit and the reference ground track settlement should then be acquired after a last maneuver on March 13. In flight commissionning  The first days of instrument commisssionning indicate good peerformances, as expected. The ground processings are under validation but the first plots done on a test configuration at CNES are very promising.   Discover as preview, the first waves' height map made from ALTIKA measurements

 http://smsc.cnes.fr/SARAL/GP_actualite.htm

[Salo]

http://www.spacenews.com/article/military-space/39343canada%E2%80%99s-sapphire-satellite-begins-operations

Canada's Sapphire Satellite Begins Operations  
By Mike Gruss | Jan. 31, 2014  

The Sapphire satellite, which launched in February 2013 aboard India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, is part of Canada's contribution to space situational awareness. Credit: Canada's Department of National Defence photo
 
Updated at 2:04 p.m. EDT
WASHINGTON -- A Canadian military satellite designed to track objects in high Earth orbit with an electo-optical sensor has completed its commissioning and commenced operations, according to a Jan. 30 press release from the program's prime contractor, MDA Corp. of Richmond, British Columbia.
The announcement came several months later than initial estimates of when the 148-kilogram satellite, built by MDA with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. of Britain, would be declared fit for service as a contributing element to the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN). The satellite was launched in February 2013 aboard India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.. 
The Canadian Defence Department said Sapphire's development, including the ground infrastructure, ultimately cost some 94.6 million Canadian dollars ($94 million), which is about 10 percent less than its budget. It is scheduled to operate for five years.

[Salo]

http://spacenews.com/article/civil-space/41627canada-devising-action-plan-for-taking-over-troubled-space-projects

Canada Devising Action Plan for Taking Over Troubled Space Projects  
By David Pugliese | Aug. 21, 2014

"Without the technical capacity within the CSA and [the Department of National Defense], it is unlikely that the NEOSSat project would have been completed successfully," concluded the CSA internal audit. Credit: Defence Research and Development Canada photo by Janice Lang
 
VICTORIA, British Columbia -- The Canadian Space Agency is working on a plan  to intervene in troubled government space projects, providing commercial firms the technical expertise, if necessary, to complete what they had been hired to do.

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The backup plan comes after an internal audit found that the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat), built on contract by a commercial firm, ran into difficulties and fell 41 months behind schedule.
At one point, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Department of National Defence, who were co-funding the 24-million-Canadian-dollar ($23 million) microsatellite, considered abandoning the project. But the two organizations decided to take a risk and continue while at the same time providing technical advice to the contractor, Microsat Systems Canada Inc. (MSCI) of Mississauga, Ontario.
"Without the technical capacity within the CSA and [the Department of National Defense], it is unlikely that the NEOSSat project would have been completed successfully," concluded the 69-page audit, titled Evaluation of Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite Project.
NEOSSat was launched in February 2013. CSA touts it as the world's first space telescope dedicated to detecting and tracking asteroids and satellites.
The audit recommended that CSA maintain the technical capability "to effectively manage projects and to step in and undertake the more technical aspects of a project if a contractor is unable to do so."
"If the prime contractor does lose capacity then the CSA should ensure it has a way to deal with that risk," it added.
In response, the CSA will develop "guidelines for project intervention" which should be ready by December, agency officials said.
By March 2015, it will have identified the areas of key technical expertise it needs to have if required to take over troubled projects from contractors. The space agency will also put in place a system to acquire engineering services when needed on a contract basis.
CSA spokeswoman Maya-Olivia Eyssen said the agency has been working on its response to the audit since earlier this year.
She noted those changes will also include "an improved process for project management at the CSA."
It will develop new methodology for project management that will include a process to provide continuous monitoring of contractor's financial, technical and project management performance. That system will be ready by March 2015.
The audit was completed in March 2014 but only recently made public.
Dynacon Inc. of Mississauga, Ontario, was awarded the contract to build NEOSSat in July 2007. In 2008 Dynacon sold its satellite business to MSCI, and MSCI continued the project as a subcontractor to Dynacon.
But according to the audit, the project faced a number of hurdles.
MSCI lacked the capability to do the project and faced a significant turnover of key staff, the audit noted.
MSCI, however, has challenged those findings. Its officials say the requirements for the project were lacking in specifics and that staff from the CSA, who were brought in to help, instead got in the way.
MSCI president David Cooper also told Postmedia news service in a July 28 article that the CSA kept asking for changes to the satellite. Cooper did not immediately respond to a call from SpaceNews for comment. Chuck Black, a space analyst and former director at the Canadian Space Commerce Association, said much of the audit places blame on contractors but the CSA and Canadian government should not escape blame for some of the problems.
A source of significant delay was the federal government approval and contracting processes, he pointed out. Even when Dynacon-MSCI was awarded the contract, it took the government another year to actually issue the contract and CSA another four months to get approval to implement the project.
In addition, some officials representing industry and the Defence Department noted that the CSA did not always appear to be managing NEOSSat efficiently or cost effectively, the audit reported.
Another delay beyond the control of MSCI stemmed from one of its subcontractors going out of business; MSCI had to replicate systems developed by the defunct subcontractor, causing another year of delay.
Although NEOSSat is operating, the images it is producing are not what was expected, the audit found. The image quality does not at present meet the imagery requirements of the scientific aspects of the mission, it added.
"A stable focus is needed in the imager in order to yield images of a scientific quality, due to the very low levels of light that are reflected off asteroids," the audit concluded. "Whether the intended production of 288 images per day can ever be achieved is a matter of concern."
But the CSA says it is confident that it can deal with the technical issues. In early June, following various flight software and parameter improvements, NEOSSat demonstrated that it can obtain scientific images, said the CSA's Eyssen. "Additional flight software upgrades are scheduled, which should lead to the full commissioning of NEOSSat during the fall," she added.

[ВВК]

Подскажите как правильно это перевести:

Salo пишет:
"Additional flight software upgrades are scheduled, which should lead to the full commissioning of NEOSSat during the fall," she added.

[napalm]

Запланированы обновления софта, которые доведут аппарат до полнофукционального вида осенью (надо думать 2014 г.).

[PIN]

ВВК пишет:
full commissioning

Речь о завершении ввода в эксплуатацию. К которой данный аппарат еще не готов, как следует из текста.

[ВВК]

napalm  и  SOE спасибо просто я читаю с Гуглом, а там слова "during the fall" переводятся как :"во время падения"

[Андрей Суворов]

ВВК пишет:
napalm и SOE спасибо просто я читаю с Гуглом, а там слова "during the fall" переводятся как :"во время падения"

fall - в переводе с американского "конец года". такое пятое время года между осенью и новым годом.

[ВВК]

Андрей Суворов пишет:

ВВК пишет:
napalm и SOE спасибо просто я читаю с Гуглом, а там слова "during the fall" переводятся как :"во время падения"

fall - в переводе с американского "конец года". такое пятое время года между осенью и новым годом.

Но Гугл должен же это знать, а не писать всякую какую-то бесмыслецу.