Small satellite design wins high praise

A microsatellite designed and built by British firms was crowned as the Aviation and Space Grand Award Winner at Popular Science's 2006 Best of What's New Awards in New York City.

TopSat, the microsatellite designed and built by a Qinetiq-led consortium of British firms, was crowned as the Aviation and Space Grand Award Winner at Popular Science's 2006 Best of What's New Awards in New York City.

TopSat received the Aviation and Space Grand Award - the top award for aerospace technology, from Popular Science, the best selling science and technology magazine in the world.

The magazine's editors sifted through thousands of entries before concluding that TopSat, which provides high resolution images of the earth at low cost, is an innovation that has the potential to change satellite and space reconnaissance technology.

"'Best of What's New' is the ultimate Popular Science accolade, representing a year's worth of work evaluating thousands of products", says Mark Jannot, Editor of Popular Science.

"These awards honour innovations that not only influence the way we live today, but that change the way we think about the future".

The award sparked a double celebration for the British consortium behind TopSat because it followed hot on the heels of the microsatellite's first birthday.

TopSat was launched from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in Northern Russia on 27th October 2005 and has been orbiting the earth at a height of 700km for the last year.

David Anderson, President and CEO of Qinetiq, accepted the award on behalf of the consortium at the presentation ceremony in Vanderbilt Hall in New York's Grand Central Terminal.

He said: "We are delighted TopSat has been honoured with the Best of What's New Grand Award from the editors of Popular Science, a magazine that is famous for its understanding of how science impacts on people's everyday lives".

"We genuinely believe that with TopSat we have entered an exciting era for small satellites, where bespoke, good quality images of the earth can be delivered to customers quickly and at low cost".

"Because TopSat is a demonstrator, it was only designed with a one-year lifespan", he added.

"TopSat has now been in orbit for more than a year and is still fully operational, performing at its optimum level and providing high resolution images to a range of customers - so it's a double celebration for us".

TopSat is a microsatellite system conceived to provide high resolution imaging of the Earth at low cost.

A key feature of the TopSat programme is the fact that the satellite was designed to return its data directly to a mobile ground station immediately after collecting an image, allowing far more timely delivery of the information which it collects.

The system is specifically designed to meet operational timescales, whether for disaster relief, news-gathering, or other applications where speed of response is vital.

TopSat was designed and built by a consortium of British companies led by Qinetiq, whose role included systems design and technical authority, provision of payload electronics units, project and operations management and data reception.

Surrey Satellite Technology developed and manufactured the satellite platform and was responsible for the integration of the payload testing, arranging the launch at Cosmos, and commissioning the satellite platform in orbit through their satellite control station.

Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) designed and manufactured the satellite's sophisticated off-axis camera and Infoterra is marketing TopSat image products.

The 5-year TopSat programme was jointly funded by the British National Space Centre (BNSC) and the UK Ministry of Defence at a mission cost below GBP 14 million.

TopSat weighs just 120kg, but carries an optical camera capable of delivering panchromatic images with a spatial resolution at nadir of 2.8m covering a 17 x 17km area, and simultaneous three-band multispectral images (red, green, blue), with a resolution of 5.6m.

This is thought to represent the best resolution per mass of any satellite launched to date.

This camera is integrated with an agile micro-satellite platform to permit pitch compensation manoeuvres, allowing imaging of low illumination scenes.

TopSat can be reprogrammed in orbit, and the consortium is exploiting this to enhance its performance.

In addition to actively pursuing further experiments for the MOD and BNSC, the consortium is also seeking new applications to which the technology can be applied.

A feature of the programme is that for a cost of GBP 25,000, customers can lease the satellite for a period of a week and control its schedule of imaging operations.

In the future, a constellation of three or four TopSat satellites could image almost any point on the Earth at least once a day, further opening up the potential for quick response imagery which is extremely cost effective to deliver.

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