![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “It is not yet economically feasible to have both a high resolution and a high revisit rate.” “But this comes at the cost of image resolution,” Pepper says. It pushes the remote sensing market towards large constellations of more than one hundred small, milk-carton sized, satellites. It therefore may take a while to refresh the image of earth, or certain parts thereof.” Whether it be for disaster relief, monitoring the impact of climate change or the prediction of cholera outbreaks, governments, industry and academia all want high revisit rates. “These are expensive, bulky and heavy, meaning that we can’t launch very many. “High-resolution imaging from space requires a large mirror, resulting in telescopes the size of a delivery van,” Pepper explains. But it can take months, or even years, for these images to be updated. Google Maps shows that it is certainly feasible to make very high-resolution images from space. But their impact can be minimized, for example by ensuring that evacuation plans and disaster relief efforts are based on the most accurate and up-to-date on-ground situation indicating, for example, which roads are still accessible. Maintaining imaging resolution while drastically reducing the size of such telescopes may drive a step change in earth observation.ĭisasters, such as the flooding catastrophe in Mozambique in March this year or the California wildfires end of last year, can’t always be prevented. Coming from a background in mining and refineries, where one “could sometimes get away with just welding on another few centimetres of steel” to amend a piece of machinery, Sean Pepper has now won the Heinz Stoewer award for his thesis work on a nanometre-scale positioning system for mirrors used in a Deployable Space Telescope. ![]()
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