{"id":66346,"date":"2018-01-12T19:28:05","date_gmt":"2018-01-12T11:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/seahawk-ocean-monitoring-payload-prepares-for-launch\/"},"modified":"2018-01-12T19:28:05","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T11:28:05","slug":"seahawk-ocean-monitoring-payload-prepares-for-launch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/seahawk-ocean-monitoring-payload-prepares-for-launch\/","title":{"rendered":"SeaHawk Ocean Monitoring Payload Prepares for Launch"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

A team of oceanic researchers from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington<\/strong> is preparing to launch a new CubeSat this summer, dubbed SeaHawk 1. The satellite will fly into orbit on a SpaceX <\/strong>Falcon 9, as part of Spaceflight Industries\u2019 <\/strong>first dedicated rideshare mission, Sun-Synchronous Orbit A (SSO-A). According to oceanographer John Morrison, SeaHawk\u2019s co-project manager and lead principle investigator, the mission will function as proof of concept for using CubeSats to collect high-quality scientific data, and will also demonstrate the upsides of using rideshares to get academic payloads into orbit.<\/p>\n

Scientists at NASA <\/strong>and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association <\/strong>(NOAA) have used satellites for years to collect ocean color data, but low quality images from global-scanning spacecraft have restricted their efforts. SeaHawk 1, with its 120 km resolution, will supplement the larger, polar orbiting satellites currently in space with more detailed data. According to Morrison, not only does the CubeSat have eight to 10 times the resolution of its predecessors, its development cost is significantly lower. \u201cBuilding the most premier sensor that we ever used cost about $14.4 million or more to develop,\u201d he said. \u201cRight now it\u2019s costing us around $500,000 to build one of these satellites, and on the order of $250,000 for launch operations with Spaceflight.\u201d<\/p>\n

SeaHawk\u2019s high resolution will allow scientists to more accurately monitor the ocean\u2019s smaller-scale features, particularly around estuaries, coral reefs and other near-shore environments, Morrison said. Additionally, because land reflects more light than the ocean, one of the major issues with currently operational global sensors is that they suffer from a lot of signal interference. SeaHawk\u2019s improved sensors can mitigte some of that saturation near coastal zones, which could prove useful in determining proper fishing zones, for example, or better characterizing marine pollution. \u201cWe can begin to look at things like red tides, phytoplankton blooms \u2026 or oil spills, or we can look at the health of fisheries and habitats,\u201d Morrison said.<\/p>\n

Players from the government, academic and commercial spheres have all contributed to the SeaHawk project: Cloudland Instruments <\/strong>is building the sensor, Clyde Space<\/strong> constructed the satellite bus with Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) components, and NASA\u2019s <\/strong>Ocean Biology Processing Group (OBPG) will download, process and make the data available to the public for free.<\/p>\n

According to Morrison, the SeaHawk project has been somewhat hobbled by the bureaucracy around getting the satellite licensed. \u201cBecause we\u2019re transmitting both data and commands globally we have to clear it with both the Federal Communications Commission<\/strong> (FCC) and the International Telecommunications Union<\/strong> (ITU), and to be honest the FCC is getting swamped with these,\u201d Morrison said. \u201cThey might have had four or five satellites a year before, now they\u2019re getting hundreds of them \u2026 They work with us, but because there are so many satellites going up now, we may not hear about our radio licensing until pretty close to the time the satellite is going up, which makes it difficult for our hardware people to tune the radios on the spacecraft as well as on the ground stations.\u201d Morrison said he\u2019s hopeful, though, that with the rapid growth of requests, the staffing at these agencies will improve in turn to accommodate them.<\/p>\n

The other issue is that Morrison\u2019s team is required by law to encrypt all the data transmitted from the satellite, even though it isn\u2019t technically a commercial asset. \u201cIf the data is encrypted, then [NASA] can\u2019t help us debug any transmission problems that might occur as they normally would,\u201d he said. As a result, the team is requesting a waiver from the FCC, but it\u2019s likely they\u2019ll have to wait up to three months to hear a response.<\/p>\n

The SSOA mission \u2014 which was delayed from its original target date last year \u2014 is the first for which Spaceflight Industries purchased an entire launch vehicle for its customers. In total, SSOA will loft 120 satellites for nearly 50 government and commercial customers from 16 countries. \u201cBuying a large launch vehicle and being able to make super competitive pricing is really attractive to educational institutions because, historically, they haven\u2019t had a surplus of money,\u201d commented Curt Blake, the company\u2019s president of spaceflight.<\/p>\n

Spaceflight Industries also purchased an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab <\/strong>last year, ideal for launching smaller satellites similar to SeaHawk 1. Due to economies of scale, dedicated smallsat launchers have a higher price per kilogram than larger vehicles like the Falcon 9 (which could be up to three times cheaper), Blake said. But the tradeoff for customers is greater control over their launch schedule and destination in orbit \u2014 not unlike the difference between a bus and a taxi. \u201cIn some instances, that\u2019s money well spent,\u201d Blake said. Spaceflight Industries\u2019 intent is to purchase a range of different launch vehicles to accommodate their customers\u2019 varying needs, such as academics like Morrison who are less concerned about timing than budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A team of oceanic researchers from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington is preparing to launch a new CubeSat this summer, dubbed SeaHawk 1. The satellite will fly into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9, as part of Spaceflight Industries\u2019 first dedicated rideshare mission, Sun-Synchronous Orbit A (SSO-A). According to oceanographer John Morrison, SeaHawk\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":66347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66346"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}