For planet earth and beyond
The ESAIL microsatellite for tracking ships worldwide – developed under an ESA Partnership Project – has completed its accommodation on Vega’s new dispenser for small satellites and is ready for launch.
A deployable laboratory that can test frontline healthcare staff, civil protection volunteers and police forces for the coronavirus has left Belgium and is on its way to Piedmont, Italy.
A navigation app that guides people on safer, more enjoyable bike journeys will be launched later this summer as social-distancing measures encourage more cyclists to take to the road.
Some €10 million is now available for proposals to use space to improve healthcare and distance learning in response to the coronavirus pandemic, thanks to the Italian national delegation to ESA.
A fully reconfigurable, software-defined, standardised satellite for the commercial telecommunications market is under development, as an ESA Partnership Project.
The second node in the most sophisticated laser communication network ever designed is ready to go into service.
Launch conditions together with the need to operate at high power levels presented a particular challenge when Airbus Defence and Space engineers – under the ARTES Competitiveness & Growth programme – set about developing a new series of Ku-band antenna feed chains.
Radiologists are investigating people’s medical conditions and pregnancies remotely thanks to an ESA-backed robotic technology. The set-up enables medics to care for some patients at a distance during the coronavirus pandemic. The system is already being used by rural hospitals, care homes and prisons across Europe and in Canada to investigate cardiac, abdominal, pelvic and urinary tract conditions.
The new Airbus Defence and Space (Airbus DS) Eurostar Neo satellite product line offers one of the largest communications payload capacity on the world market. The amount of thermal dissipation created by such large communication payloads requires innovative thermal control solutions, such as the East-West-Radiator system (EWRs). The Eurostar Neo EWRs will be based on a revolutionary EHD pump developed by APR Technologies (Sweden), under the technical lead of Airbus DS, in the frame of ESA’s Neosat Partnership Project.
Demand for oil has collapsed due to the coronavirus pandemic just as supply is about to strengthen because of a dispute between Russia and Saudi Arabia. As a result, oil prices have sunk to levels not seen since 2002.