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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.