Space Cameras

What if things in space broke down as often as our microwave, washing machine or robot on a processing line in a factory?

First of all, light is a physical phenomenon that has a dual nature. On the one hand, it is a stream of photons (the smallest energy carriers) that move in a specific direction, while on the other hand, it is a wave. For this reason, the nature of light is described as wave-particle duality, which gives the light a unique range of parameters.

Now we know what the light is, how it is measured and what are the spectra of the light. Now it’s time to talk about telescopes, that can observe Earth and universe. Telescopes are our “better eyes” when it comes to seeing things that can’t be (easily) seen by a human. We are going to compare Scanway’s four telescopes with the newest NASA telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope.

Firstly – what is an orbit? It is the path an object takes in space around another body (or, more precisely, a barycenter) as a result of the force of gravity. Let us narrow our considerations to the Earth’s orbit.

The operation of a satellite in orbit begins with the moment of deploy – the ejection of satellites from the rocket, which gain the status of separate, independent objects belonging to companies and institutions from all over the world.

In the first part of this article, we leaned into some of the failures of space vehicles. In this part, we will look at four more failures and briefly talk about how they can be detected and, consequently, even avoided.

„Houston, we’ve had a problem” – you hear something like that and now what? Unfortunately, even in the space sector, failures happen, but the trick is to identify and resolve them quickly.

Some of them are due to errors in the design phase, some come from poorly installed components, and some are simply misfortune. In this article, we will talk about spacecraft failures and how to identify, prevent and repair them.

GSD is an abbreviation for ground sample distance. In photography, it refers to the distance between the centers of pixels next to each other. The smaller this value is, the better image we are able to obtain, the representation of reality in the image is better; smaller details are visible.

It’s the same if we look at the world from orbit – we’re able to see constantly occurring changes on a larger scale – both in terms of terrain, but also over a longer period of time. The balcony from which we take a picture may be obscured by another building, while the view from orbit would never be so obscured – having satellite image processing software, we are able to easily compare two pictures from two different time periods.

The first ever aerial photograph was taken by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon in 1858 from a balloon. He photographed the town of Bievre in France using the wet plate collodion process photography.

Thirty years later, in 1888, Arthur Batut using a camera hooked up to a kite, took aerial photos of the town of Labruguiere. Interestingly, the photos were taken only after the kite had reached a certain assumed altitude; an altimeter was attached to the system.

In today’s article, we will answer some basic questions that may be on the minds of aspiring space enthusiasts.

Water covers more than 70% of our planet’s surface, which has a direct impact on our daily lives. Acquiring up-to-date, high-resolution information makes it possible to predict the weather, but it also makes it possible to observe climate change, map the ocean floor, observe coral reefs, or measure tidal heights.

Before discussing the tests themselves, let’s go back in time a bit. The system (telescope, satellite, subsystem) was designed in CAD software – but unfortunately, the reality is often (almost always) different from the theory – some calculations may have been made incorrectly, some details may have been overlooked, and various problems or errors may have occurred during the integration itself.