Page 33 - EngineerIT November 2021

SPACE SCIENCE

weighs only 58.7 kilograms and uses 47 watts of power to
operate – about as much as a bedside lamp – where WindSat
weighs 450 kilograms and uses 350 watts.
A team of NASA scientists and engineers began developing
the instrument in 2013 at JPL with a budget of $24 million
– one-fifth the cost of WindSat. They completed COWVR on
budget and on schedule in 27 months, aiming for a planned
launch in 2018. “It took a really talented team to do that,”
Brown pointed out. “We had to use everyone’s best engineering
judgment to keep moving forward.”
When the planned 2018 launch didn’t pan out, the Air Force
turned to the Space Test Programme, which provides launches
to the space station for the military science and engineering
community. The space station orbit will give COWVR a view
of the ocean surface at different times of day on each orbit,
compared with a Sun-synchronous orbit that carries a satellite
over any part of globe at the same time each day. Over time, this
will aid understanding of how ocean waves develop and change
throughout the day. LTE
Cinterion CL31
Watching tropical storms with TEMPEST
“The Navy is really interested in monitoring tropical cyclone
intensity, but that was one of the things we couldn’t design into and CW31 System
COWVR because we had a very compressed schedule,” JPL’s
Brown said. But JPL had an instrument already built for just that on Module
purpose: TEMPEST. About the size of a cereal box, it was a flight
spare – a duplicate created in case of damage or other problems
with a spaceborne instrument – for the TEMPEST-D 2018 NASA
technology demonstration mission. LTE with 3G/2G fallback and with VoLTE/CSFB
TEMPEST, too, is a microwave radiometer, but instead of for worldwide coverage
winds it measures microwave wavelengths that are sensitive
to the presence of water vapour. Collecting data on multiple
hurricanes and other storms between 2018 and last June, it had
already demonstrated that it could measure water vapour at Flexibility to serve multiple performance,
several levels of the atmosphere as well as the heritage satellites memory and connectivity (cellular/non-
cellular) options with the same design
do.
“TEMPEST brings to the table an ability to sense both the
amount of atmospheric moisture and its vertical distribution,”
said Steve Swadley, the lead for calibration and validation of Processing power, rich multimedia experience
and reliable connectivity packed into one
microwave sensors at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in highly integrated package
Monterey, California. “This is important both for numerical
models and for characterising the moisture surrounding tropical
cyclones. So when Shannon [Brown] told us: ‘We have a spare
TEMPEST – would that be useful on this mission?’ the answer A wide range of proven Thales biometric
was an emphatic yes.” solutions pre-integrated
If the instruments operate as expected, the lower-priced
new technology is likely to see widespread use. Organisations
would be able to launch four or five satellites on the same
budget that formerly would have paid for one. Currently, State-of-the-art Security, QoS, and zero-touch
there are so few weather satellites that only one or two of connectivity with the onboard eSIM
them may pass over a growing storm in an entire day. Those
few “snapshots” of a storm don’t give forecasters enough For more information or advice please
information to monitor the kind of explosive growth that so
many storms now exhibit. More satellites will give scientists a contact Renaldo Fibiger on 083 388 6501 or
chance to increase the accuracy of forecasts and save more lives. rfibiger@arrow.altech.co.za
But that’s looking far ahead, Brown noted. The STP-H8
mission is still a technology demonstration to show the feasibility
of the instruments. “We have no reason to think we won’t meet
our objectives, but whatever comes out of it, we’re confident
that we’re going to learn a lot.” n

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