The Sentinel-3 Toolbox is being developed for ESA by Brockmann Consult in partnership with the University of Reading, C-S France, ACRI-ST and Array. Sentinel-3 Altimetry Toolbox The Broadview Radar Altimetry Too
Solar Orbiter array deployment Access the video Solar Orbiter’s solar arrays presented another engineering challenge. The temperature the cells are exposed to varies with the spacecraft’s distance from the Sun. At its closest (42 million km from the Sun) the temperature far exceeds 300 °...
Hawaii; NRAO’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope; the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope; the William Herschel Telescope at La Palma, Spain; the IRAM/Plateau de Bure Interferometer (PdBI); the Max-Planck Millimetre Bolometer...
Electrical Power System (EPS), comprising one solar array wing providing power to the spacecraft and payload. Attitude and Orbit Control System (AOCS) composed of a coarse sun sensor, magnetometers, coarse rate sensors, star trackers, a GNSS receiver and control actuators including thrusters, magn...
An announcement will follow to confirm when the liquid helium coolant has been exhausted. Herschel carries three science instruments: HIFI (Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared), a high-resolution spectrometer; PACS (Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer); SPIRE (Spectral and Photometric Ima...
Another Enbio product, ‘Solar White’ is also being tested for other elements of Solar Orbiter exposed to the Sun, including its main antenna, instrument booms and solar array attachments. “We’ve found that the Solar Black works well as a ‘tie layer’ foundation on metal...
are well known and are dependent on both wind speed and direction with respect to the point from which the sea surface is observed. ASCAT exploits this fact by transmitting pulses of microwave energy (at 5.255 GHz, C-band) towards the surface of the Earth and recording the resulting ec...
operate at around 42 million kilometres from the Sun. This is just inside the closest point of Mercury’s orbit to the Sun, at 46 million kilometres. From such distances, the Sun is fearsome. Mercury’s surface can reach temperatures of more than 400°C, making it hot enough to melt ...
The first signal from Sentinel-3A was received after 92 min by the Kiruna station in Sweden. Telemetry links and attitude control were then established by controllers at ESA’s ESOC operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany, allowing them to monitor the health of the satellite. ...
“If their temperature had fallen to below -40°C, they could have undergone ‘cold welding’, sticking them in place and preventing the doors of the remote sensing instruments from opening.” “The pins had already gotten too cold to move, and were in danger of sticking. To prevent this...