CLYDE SPACE WILL COLLABORATING ON OCEAN MONITORING PROJECT WITH U.S. UNIVERSITY
GLASGOW, U.K. - Clyde Space is collaborating with an American university and a team of U.S.-based scientists to develop new technology to study ocean biology. The Glasgow company announced on April 21 it is building CubeSats to observe the changing biology of the surface ocean and its implications for the marine food chain, climate scientists, fisheries and coastal resource managers, and a range of other experts from the military to oil spill responders.
The project is being led by John M Morrison, Professor of Physics and Physical Oceanography at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and also involves Cloudland Instruments of Santa Barbara, CA, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, and Hawk Institute for Space Sciences, Pocomoke City, MD.
Professor Morrison said a recent report by the National Academy of Science showed ocean color satellites provided a unique vantage point for observing the changing biology in the surface ocean. They provide observations of how changes in ocean biology affect important elemental cycles, such as the carbon and nitrogen cycles, and how the ocean's biological processes influence the climate system.
The new project is called SOCON (Sustained Ocean Observation from Nanosatellites). It will develop and construct two SeaHawk CubeSats with HawkEye Ocean Colour Sensors in two years at a cost of $1.675m (£1.12m). The final product will be 130 times smaller (10cm×10cm×34cm), 45 times lighter (approximately 4 kg), with a ground resolution 7-15 times better (150-75 meters per pixel), while still having a Signal/Noise Ratio approximately 50 percent that of SeaWiFs - the previous system used for ocean water study. The planned launch of the satellites is early 2017.
CubeSats are part of a growing area of interest in the satellite industry. The reduction in size of computer components is allowing governments and companies to build much smaller satellites than they have in the past. The small size can reduce costs significantly. These reduced costs are allowing more organizations to get involved in building and operating satellites and enabling other organizations to cheaply expand the scope of larger, more expensive missions.
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