5 minute read
ENGINEERING IN SPACE: THE SATELLITES OF THE FUTURE
The space industry is at a stage like commercial air travel after World War II, and the internet in the nineties. The growth market par excellence are satellites. As they become smaller and lighter, their cost performance has increased to a much greater extent than other technologies. On 14 November 2024, Alumni Engineers KU Leuven and the student team Aether organised a well-attended forum evening on the importance of satellites in the ever-growing space industry.
Nancy Vermeulen, founder of the Space Training Academy and Space Ambassador, kicked off with a concise history of commercial space travel. "The early years of the space race were primarily a competition between superpowers marked by nationalistic exploration and national security intentions," Nancy said. "The cost to access space long proved prohibitive, undermining commercial business cases. Only recently, we have seen significant acceleration dawn the cost curve. Launch costs have fallen 95% thanks to improved engineering and increased volume".
According to the speaker, the space economy's breakthrough has now definitely started. "Today, the space economy is valued at nearly half a trillion dollars and is growing at about 9% annually. Massive technological innovation is creating the opportunity for more capabilities to be deployed above Earth for the benefit of those on Earth. These capabilities and the prices at which they can be delivered could provide the linchpin in solving hard problems, not only for business but also for the wellbeing of people and the future of the planet."
Radiation
In October 2023, the European Space Agency sent a satellite into space with on board a special chip developed at KU Leuven-Geel Campus in collaboration with CERN in Switzerland. Prof Jeffrey Prinzie of the ADVISE research group told the story of the RADIOX Cube Sat mission in his keynote.
"Our planet is literally being bombarded with high-energy charged particles," Prof Prinzie said. "These are mainly protons and electrons coming from the sun or from the cosmos. They form radiation belts that typically circulate thousands of kilometres above the Earth's surface.
However, around the Earth's magnetic poles and over the southern part of the Atlantic Ocean, they get close and disrupt the proper functioning of satellites and spacecraft. Depending on their orbit around the Earth, satellites can sometimes fail to function for up to 1/3 of their time as a result."
The chip designed at Geel Campus is resistant to radiation and can accurately map the concentration of these particles. For a year, the chip permanently measures radiation above the Earth. Through the operator ISIS, researchers at Geel Campus receive daily updates. After a year, the satellite with the chip has made enough orbits around the Earth to produce a detailed map of the radiation intensity at all points.
Corona
The third keynote speaker was Marc Dielissen, alumnus of Group T Campus and Engineering Manager at Redwire Space. This company specialises in small satellites and supplies equipment and parts for the International Space Station. Marc presented PROBA, which stands for On Boarding Autonomy.
"The PROBA satellites are capable of performing virtually unaided. They perform everyday tasks like navigation, payload, and resource management with little involvement by operators on ground".
While PROBA 1 and 2 were deployed to observe the Earth and more specifically for vegetation monitoring, PROBA 3 focuses on the sun's corona. During the mission, two satellites will fly in formation with the one in the furthest orbit shielding the light from the solar disk so that the second one can accurately survey the sun's corona for long periods of time.
"The sensor system is designed so that both satellites can find each other and estimate their relative position to each other to within a few millimetres accuracy allowing them to operate autonomously in formation," Marc said. By the end of November 2024, both satellites were launched aboard a PSCV rocket of the Indian Space Research Organisation.
Multipurpose
Jeroen Cappaert, alumnus of the Faculty of Engineering Science, closed the evening with the success story of the company he founded in San Francisco in 2012 and has grown into a NYSE-listed public enterprise with $100m revenue.
As a spaceto-cloud data and analytics company, Spire Global specialises in the tracking of global data sets powered by a large constellation of nanosatellites, such as the tracking of maritime, aviation and weather patterns. Jeroen's company owns and operates the largest constellation of multipurpose satellites including one hundred copies in orbit, thirty ground stations and seventy external systems.
The appetite for space-based data is still hard to satisfy and is growing every day with advancements in AI and machine learning. One of the examples Jeroen gave concerns weather forecasting.
"Weather variability creates $3 trillion of economic loss a year, which is expected to grow 60% by 2050 as a result of climate change. Our satellites measure temperatures, pressure, and humidity more than 10,000 times a day globally. This continuous scan of the atmosphere creates a unique global weather observation dataset that proves invaluable. And weather forecasting is only a fraction of the potential of our satellites. They are capable of much more. The best is yet to come..."
-Yves Persoons
