Speaker
Description
SSTL is one of the world’s leading small satellite providers and has a rich history dating back to its establishment in the mid 1980’s in providing flight opportunities for environment monitoring instruments, especially benefitting those seeking a low cost approach and short timescales to the flight. This has included hosting environment monitoring instruments on commercial missions, as well being prime contractor on the dedicated UK demonstration mission TechDemoSat-1 which included several environment monitoring instruments. Additionally SSTL has flown (or is planning to fly) its own environment monitoring instrument, the RADMON, on a number of its own spacecraft to provide enhanced monitoring and diagnostic capability. Such a RADMON will also fly on each of the two spacecraft in the joint US-UK CIRCE space weather mission next year.
This talk will provide an SSTL perspective on flight opportunities for environment monitoring instruments including past heritage and an overview of currently ongoing/planned mission and spacecraft activities at SSTL, which could present potential flight opportunities for environment monitoring instruments, either as hosted payloads or even dedicated missions. The potential for offering a service using RADMON data on future SSTL spacecraft will also be briefly discussed.
