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Galileo Masters 2006 winners |
30 April 2007
If you or your company or university has an innovative idea for a ground-breaking use of satellite navigation, now is the time to put it to the test. This year’s Galileo Masters competition opens on 1 May and will remain open for submissions until 31 July 2007.
The Application Center Ltd. Oberpfaffenhofen, together with the Munich International Trade Fair and its business-to-business trade fair SYSTEMS, are searching for the Galileo Masters 2007. This European satellite navigation competition, which began in 2004, is run under the patronage of the Bavarian Ministry for Economics, Transport, and Technology and supported by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and ESA through its Technology Transfer Programme (TTP). Its aim is to encourage small enterprises in participating European regions to come up with new ideas for satellite navigation applications.
Many outstanding ideas have been presented at previous editions. These include a seismograph that uses the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) timing signals to detect natural disasters and many other innovate uses of satellite navigation such as improving urban transportation, helping the blind become more mobile, calculating a site’s exposure to sunlight, hoeing weeds and rescuing hikers.
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Conor Keegan, Galileo Masters 2006 overall winner |
The Galileo Masters 2007 addresses companies, entrepreneurs, research establishments, universities as well as individuals in the following 10 high-tech European regions: Bavaria (Germany), Nice Sophia Antipolis (France), Göteborg (Sweden), Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Prague (Czech Republic), Province of South Holland (the Netherlands), Madrid (Spain), Hessen (Germany), Wallonie (Belgium) and Baden Würtemberg (Germany).
Competitors can choose the region in which they want to participate. The overall winner will be provided with an office for six months within the “business incubator” of the region they selected and given support during this time to convert the proposed idea into a business product.
A new feature of this year’s competition is the opportunity to be awarded a special topic prize from a sponsoring partner. These are:
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- T-Systems Enterprise Services GmbH, which is looking for the best applications for seamless localisation and navigation
- DHL Innovation Center, a brand of Deutsche Post World Net, which is seeking innovative solutions for an intelligent traffic control system
- DLR which is searching for applications ready to be tested at the Galileo Test and Development Environment Gate in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria
Each of the 10 European regions will select five finalists. From these a team of 80 international experts from industry, research institutes, DLR and ESA will select the Galileo Masters 2007 and the winner of each region. All the winners, including the topic winners, will be announced at an official presentation on 23 October 2007.
Judging from the innovative ideas presented by previous year’s finalists it is expected that 2007 will also result in many convincing new applications that will enhance the products and services provided by satellite navigation.
Galileo perspective
When fully deployed in 2011-2012, Galileo, Europe’s own global navigation satellite system, will be the world’s first completely civilian positioning system. Galileo will provide a highly accurate, guaranteed global positioning service and will be inter-operable with GPS and GLONASS, the two other global satellite navigation systems. Galileo is a joint initiative between ESA and the European Commission.
Galileo's increased reliability will be particularly useful in situations where safety is paramount, for example when guiding planes, ships or road traffic. GIOVE-A, the first Galileo in-orbit validation element, was successfully launched on 28 December 2005. At 17:25 GMT on the 12 January 2006, the first Galileo signals were transmitted from the satellite.
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Galileo final constellation of 30 satellites |
The fully deployed Galileo system will consist of 30 satellites, 27 operational plus 3 active spares, positioned in three circular Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) planes at 23 222 km altitude above the Earth, and at an inclination of the orbital planes of 56 degrees with reference to the equatorial plane. Once this is achieved, the Galileo navigation signals will provide good coverage even at latitudes up to 75 degrees north, which corresponds to the North Cape and beyond. The large number of satellites, together with the optimisation of the constellation and the availability of the three active spare satellites, will ensure that the loss of one satellite has no discernible effect on the user.
For companies with innovative ideas on how to use the improved navigation data from the Galileo satellites there will be new markets to exploit benefiting daily life. Galileo will provide considerable economic and social benefits for all and particularly for Europeans.
More information on the competition is provided on the European Satellite Navigation Competition 2007 ‘Galileo Masters’ website. www.galileo-masters.com
ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme Office
Companies which would like to follow up an idea and turn it into a long term business may use offer made by the ESA Business Incubation, part of the Agency’s Technology Transfer Programme (TTP) Office.
The mission of the TTP Office is to facilitate the use of space technology and space systems for non-space applications and to further demonstrate the benefit of the European Space Programme to the European citizens.
The TTP operations can be divided into two lines of business. Firstly, TTP identifies technology transfer opportunities and performs feasibility studies. Secondly support is provided for the commercial development of the technology transfer through new venturing.
Further information, is available on ESA's Technology Transfer Programme Office website at www.esa.int/ttp.
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30 April 2007
Ever wondered if Envisat, Integral or the ISS was overhead? Now you can view the location of ESA's Earth-orbiting spacecraft and other ESA-related missions in real-time via our new tracking site.
The new 'Track ESA Spacecraft' feature is now online. Access the tracker by clicking on the icon link on the right, or below.
Once the site loads, the tracker automatically starts displaying the location of the International Space station (ISS).
It can also show ground tracks for ESA (and ESA's partners) space observatory missions, including Integral, XMM-Newton, Cluster and the Hubble Space Telescope; for GIOVE-A, our first Galileo mission; and for our Earth observation missions ERS-2, Envisat and Proba.
Our tracker works as a gadget - a small slice of Javascript combined with a traditional HTML-based web page and hosted on multiple servers. The satellite location data is combined with map images provided by Google maps, plus formatting instructions, and automatically updated on the site. The actual satellite locations are updated every hour.
ESA Spacecraft Tracker
Click here to access.
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 Click image to enlarge
In its 17 years of exploring the heavens, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made nearly 800,000 observations and snapped nearly 500,000 images of more than 25,000 celestial objects. Hubble does not travel to stars, planets and galaxies. It takes pictures of them as it whirls around Earth at 17,500 miles an hour. In its 17-year lifetime, the telescope has made nearly 100,000 trips around our planet. Those trips have racked up plenty of frequent-flier-miles, about 2.4 billion, which is the equivalent of a round trip to Saturn. | |
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Image above: Flight Engineer Suni Williams works with water tanks in the Progress 24 spacecraft docked to the International Space Station. Image credit: NASA
The Expedition 15 crew members completed their first full week alone aboard the International Space Station since the departure of the previous crew on April 21.
Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineers Oleg Kotov and Suni Williams performed medical exams, science experiments, emergency drills and station maintenance.
Williams, who has been working aboard the space station since December, was informed Thursday that she will return to Earth with the STS-117 crew on space shuttle Atlantis, targeted for launch June 8. That shuttle mission will carry her successor, astronaut Clay Anderson, to the station to begin his duty as an Expedition 15 flight engineer.
The exchange of Anderson and Williams was originally planned for the STS-118 mission, now targeted for launch in August. However, that flight, first set to fly in June, had to be postponed after an unexpected hail storm damaged Atlantis' external fuel tank and delayed STS-117.
The Zvezda Service Module's engines were test fired on Wednesday in the first of a set of scheduled reboost maneuvers to optimize the station's docking opportunities with the ISS Progress 25 cargo craft in May and Atlantis in June. It was the first firing of the service module's main engines since Zvezda arrived in 2000.
The station's former occupants, Expedition 14 Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin, returned to Earth along with spaceflight participant Charles Simonyi aboard their Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft on April 21. Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin will remain at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia for several weeks of post mission debriefing and rehabilitation.
+ View Expedition 14 landing images
+ Read more about Expedition 15
+ Read more about Expedition 14
+ View Crew's Daily Timelines
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24 April 2007
A 50 light-year-wide view of the Carina Nebula has been released to celebrate the 17th anniversary of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Carina is an immense nebula situated at an estimated 7 500 light years away in the southern constellation Carina, at the keel of the ship Argo Navis. This panoramic image of the nebula gives us a peek into star formation as it commonly occurs along the dense spiral arms of a galaxy.
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“Mountain" of cold hydrogen |
A mosaic of 48 images taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, it is overlaid with information in colour obtained from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. It shows the process of star birth at a new level of detail.
The landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit it. These stars are now acting on the surrounding material leftover after their birth to produce a second generation of stars.
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Zooming and panning on the Carina Nebula |
The nebula contains a dozen or more brilliant stars each estimated to be at least 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun. Eta Carinae, the most luminous star, will sooner or later end its life through a gigantic supernova explosion. Signs for this are the two lobes of dust and gas surrounding the star that indicate the end of its relatively brief eruptive phase.
Approximately three million years ago, the nebula’s first generation of newborn stars condensed and ignited in the middle of a huge cloud of cold molecular hydrogen. The radiation from the stars carved out an expanding bubble of hot gas.
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Nuggets of cold molecular hydrogen |
The black clouds seen in the picture are nodules of dust and gas across the nebula that have survived ‘photoionisation’ - a process in which electromagnetic radiation (photons) rips away electrons from neutral atoms and molecules.
The strong stellar winds and ultraviolet radiation within the cavity of hot gas are compressing the surrounding walls of cold hydrogen, triggering the birth of a new generation of stars.
Our Sun and Solar System may have been born inside such a cosmic crucible 4.6 thousand million years ago.
Notes for editors:
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA.
During its 17-year lifetime, the telescope has carried out nearly
To date, the orbiting observatory has produced more than 30 terabytes of data. Approximately 10 gigabytes of data is produced daily, enough information to fill the hard drive of a typical home computer in two weeks.
The Hubble archive sends about 66 gigabytes of data each day to astronomers throughout the world. This data has contributed to nearly 7 000 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built.
