{"id":66394,"date":"2018-01-05T20:58:27","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T12:58:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/ses-satellite-to-host-nasa-payload-for-the-first-time\/"},"modified":"2018-01-05T20:58:27","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T12:58:27","slug":"ses-satellite-to-host-nasa-payload-for-the-first-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/ses-satellite-to-host-nasa-payload-for-the-first-time\/","title":{"rendered":"SES Satellite to Host NASA Payload for the First Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n<p>A <strong>NASA <\/strong>research mission is hitching a ride to orbit on a commercial communications satellite this month for the first time in the agency\u2019s history. NASA\u2019s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD)&nbsp;mission, an instrument designed to monitor the upper layers of the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, will operate as a hosted payload on <strong>SES\u2019 <\/strong>new SES 14 satellite. <strong>Arianespace <\/strong>will loft SES 14 on Jan. 25 from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana.<\/p>\n<p>GOLD\u2019s primary goals are to improve scientists\u2019 understanding of how the ionosphere interacts both with terrestrial weather from below and solar activity from above. According to NASA researchers, who held a live briefing on Jan. 4, GOLD data will help improve forecasting models of space weather events \u2014 such as geomagnetic storms \u2014 that can impact satellite transmissions, as well as technology on Earth\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n<p>This is a new area of scientific research, said GOLD mission scientist Sarah Jones. In the past, researchers believed that the ionosphere \u2014 which starts about 60 km (37 miles) above the horizon \u2014 was primarily affected by the particles the sun flings out into space. While the sun\u2019s radiation certainly influences the way radio signals travel through the atmosphere (and the ionosphere specifically, where charged particles ping around like billiard balls), scientists recently realized that weather activity on the Earth below also causes variations above. Tsunamis, which create oscillations in the air that move upward, are one example Jones highlighted.<\/p>\n<p>What sets the GOLD mission apart from its predecessors is its vast distance from the Earth. \u201cWhat we wanted to do was get the big picture,\u201d said GOLD principal investigator Richard Eastes. \u201cFor years we\u2019ve been studying the Earth\u2019s atmosphere \u2026 in detail from the ground and in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). We wanted to back off and get it from Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and look at it all at once. We wanted to get pictures of the [ionosphere\u2019s] temperature, which is something we never had before.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As such, bolting GOLD\u2019s spectrograph onto another satellite that was destined for GEO, rather than building and launching a custom bus, made perfect sense. Not only can a hosted payload customer take advantage of SES\u2019 ground stations, they can also save \u201cup to hundreds of millions of dollars\u201d compared to procuring a satellite on their own, said Todd Gossett, SES\u2019 senior director of hosted payloads.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA company like SES [that] owns and operates dozens of satellites has to sustain this fleet by procuring and launching about three satellites per year,\u201d Gossett said. \u201cWe\u2019re able most of the time to provide excess size, space, and power that is valuable real estate to a customer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>SES 14 is meant to replace NSS 806, a communications satellite that lost 12 transponders last summer after an anomaly. Positioned at 47.5 degrees west over Brazil, SES 14\u2019s C-band wide beams will expand the reach of the company\u2019s second cable neighborhood in Latin America, while its Ku-band high throughput spot beams will serve the aeronautical market and other traffic-intensive applications such as maritime, cellular backhaul and broadband services. Its Ku-band wide beams will also contribute to Direct-to-Home (DTH) and Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) services in the Americas and the North Atlantic.<\/p>\n<p>Because the satellite will hover in a fixed position in the sky and has a complete view of the hemisphere, GOLD will boast a 30-minute data collection cadence, allowing NASA to study the ionosphere on a daily basis for the first time.<\/p>\n<p>SES 14 manufacturer <strong>Airbus <\/strong>integrated the satellite and the GOLD payload at its Toulouse, France facility last April. Once in placed into Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO) by an Ariane 5 rocket at the end of this month, it will take the satellite approximately eight more months to travel to its final orbital slot using electric propulsion.<\/p>\n<p>NASA plans to follow up GOLD with another spacecraft in LEO, the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON), attached to an <strong>Orbital ATK<\/strong> LEOStar 2 bus.<\/p>\n<p>While Gossett did not allude to any definite hosted payload contracts for the future, he hinted that such partnerships could prove to be a lucrative new source of supplemental income. \u201cIt\u2019s a source of revenue for the company but it also extends our partnership with the U.S. government beyond just communications services, and gets us into new an interesting areas that could be of potential benefit to the U.S. and its partners around the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A NASA research mission is hitching a ride to orbit on a commercial communications satellite this month for the first time in the agency\u2019s history. NASA\u2019s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD)&nbsp;mission, an instrument designed to monitor the upper layers of the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, will operate as a hosted payload on SES\u2019 new [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":66395,"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-66394","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\/66394"}],"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=66394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66394\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}