Military/Aerospace Electronics

Four more O3B satellites have been launched, to help provide telco services in emerging markets.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved plans for the Athena X-ray space telescope, which will be the largest of its kind ever built. Costing about €1 billion, the flagship project will launch in 2028. It will weigh in at 5 tonnes, be about 12 metres long and will provide 100 times greater sensitivity than existing X-ray missions. The telescope will ...

NASA and the National Space Grant Foundation have selected five universities to design systems, concepts and technologies to enhance capabilities for deep space missions. They are part of the 2015 Exploration Habitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge. The idea is to encourage studies in spaceflight-related disciplines, and also to help the agency gather new ideas to complement its current R&D. Throughout ...

Thales Alenia Space has announced the acquisition of the “space activities” of Systems Engineering & Assessment (SEA) Limited, which is part of Cohort plc. Thales Alenia Space UK expects the deal will boost growth in systems engineering and research and technology. “Our decision to come to the UK, motivated by the UK Government’s work has been supported by concrete actions ...

NASA has successfully beamed a high-definition video 260 miles from the International Space Station to Earth using a new laser communications instrument. The US space agency says the transmission of the “Hello, World!” video was the first 175-megabit communication for the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS). It was a technology demonstration, says NASA, to test methods for communication with ...

Smart fusing of data from multiple image sensors can improve military driving, said a European consortium. Several image sensor types are used in military applications: daylight sensors (mostly CCD), image intensifier tubes for low light, and thermal (short, medium and long wavelength). Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and some sort of mixing can be useful. “The typical solution ...

Providing Mobile (MSS), Fixed (FSS) and Broadcast Satellite Services (BSS)

The need to be green is now an established way of thinking ion the consumer market. It has also been heavily adopted in eth aerospace sector, and now military systems are following the call. “Sustainability initiatives, green energy and environmental regulation are part of everyday life both in a domestic setting and in the wider world,” says Steve Munns, mil-aero ...

Kontron VX3327’s is a 3U VPX graphics card with AMD Embedded Radeon E6760 GPU which is designed to military standards. Its 480 computing cores are capable of parallel data processing performance of up to 576GFlops. The 35W board uses conduction cooling to deal with a temperature range of -40°C to +85°C. The OpenVPX-compliant 3U VPX graphics card has been designed ...