NEWS

Darwin was founded with the goal of combining terrestrial and satellite communications; you can read the story of our founding here. We’ve made huge strides in the intervening time, and we’re pleased to report a new landmark: we’ve been granted a patent for our vehicle communications technology. In a moving vehicle, it can be difficult to remain connected to terrestrial networks. If you’ve ever tried to use the internet while travelling through the countryside in a car or train, you’ll probably know this all too well. It’s common to move into areas that aren’t currently covered by terrestrial networks, or to experience brief interruptions in service as your device switches from one network to another. Darwin’s technology, patented under the name ‘Routing vehicle-to-everything communications’, enables vehicles to stay reliably connected on the move. Our technology monitors the quality of available terrestrial and satellite networks and, when the current network becomes unreliable or unavailable, it seamlessly routes the connection through the best available alternative. By using satellites to supplement terrestrial networks, we enable vehicles to remain connected almost anywhere. In addition, by switching seamlessly between networks, we avoid the interruptions in service that devices might otherwise experience when making network changes. The patent number is GB2588373, and you can view the details of the patent on the Intellectual Property Office’s website. The Certificate of Grant of Patent is also available here. If you’re a vehicle manufacturer or you operate a large fleet or transport service that could benefit from improved connectivity, get in touch and we’d be happy to discuss your needs. Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.

15 December 2022 was a chilly day in Oxford, with temperatures well below freezing. We’re delighted that so many people were willing to brave the weather and join us for a festive dinner at the University of Oxford’s Balliol College. Every year, Darwin traditionally celebrates all efforts by the team, partners and suppliers with a meal at one of Oxford’s colleges. The University of Oxford plays an important part in Darwin’s successes, and our connection with academia can also be seen in our work with the University of Glasgow, the University of Málaga, Sorbonne University etc. During pre-dinner drinks, we were treated to a talk about the 760-year history of Balliol. Balliol College was founded in 1263, making it one of Oxford’s oldest colleges, although the colleges tend to clash over exactly which one is the oldest. After learning about our host, Darwin’s employees, suppliers and partners sat down for a meal together. It was an evening of warmth in the midst of December, with good food, good conversation and good speeches. To open the meal, Daniela Petrovic of Darwin welcomed and thanked us all. To close it, Antonio Franchi of the European Space Agency reflected on all that ESA and Darwin had achieved so far in partnership, and on the exciting projects that lie ahead. At Darwin, we’re grateful for the hard work of all our employees, contractors, partners and suppliers. We work with ideas and technology, but ultimately every success we’ve had is due to the hard work of individuals. It was a pleasure to bring people together and celebrate what we’ve achieved, and we’re looking forward to reaching greater heights in 2023. Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Happy New Year from Darwin! 2022 has been an exciting year at Darwin. In particular, we’re delighted by the successful trial of the Darwin Autonomous Shuttle in Oxford. For the world to benefit from the potential of autonomous vehicles, they need to coexist alongside human drivers, so it’s great to see a self-driving shuttle successfully navigating the busy roads of a city in the UK. Through our work trialling and supporting autonomous vehicles, we hope to bring about a future that’s greener, more efficient and easier to navigate. We’ve also done some work expanding our website to talk more about the services and resources we offer. If you haven’t already seen our 5G and satellite page, or our page on the Darwin Business Innovation Lab, take a look! It’s been a bright and busy year, filled with workshops, conferences, visits, reports and demonstrations. We’ve introduced the Darwin Autonomous Shuttle to a wider audience, we’ve collaborated on cybersecurity with Telefónica Tech, and we’ve released our first children’s book. We hope you’ll join us in 2023 to see what comes next. Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Earlier this year, NASA announced a plan to retire the International Space Station (ISS) and bring it down to Earth in 2031. The ISS is a huge achievement: a space station that has hosted decades of international collaboration and research. In this post, we take a quick look at the history of the ISS, and at its planned retirement. How was the ISS built? The International Space Station project grew out of NASA’s plans to construct a space station called Freedom, announced in 1984. Largely for budgetary reasons, Freedom was redesigned several times. The ISS is smaller than Freedom was intended to be, but it remains the largest artificial satellite in orbit around Earth, and a stunningly impressive achievement. As the ‘International’ in the name suggests, the International Space Station is a remarkable collaboration between different nations. Five different space agencies across three different continents are involved in the ISS project: the USA’s NASA, Europe’s ESA, Japan’s JAXA, Canada’s CSA and Russia’s Roscosmos. The ISS is about the size of a football field, and you’d be correct to think it’s hard to get anything that large into space. Because of this, the ISS was constructed over time in orbit, rather than being built entirely on Earth and then launched. It’s made of many modules, which were individually built and launched at different times, and were then attached to each other in space. The Zarya module was the first part of the ISS to be launched, on 20 November 1998. The second module, Unity, was launched on 4 December 1998, and astronauts connected it to Zarya two days later: the first connection made in the gradual expansion of the ISS. If you’d like to hear a firsthand account of the connection of Unity to Zarya, episode 73 of the NASA podcast Houston, We Have a Podcast features an interview with Jerry Ross, one of the astronauts personally involved in Unity’s installation. The episode is called ‘The International Space Station Begins: Part 2’, and you can find it here, along with a transcript of the interview. The most recent modules, Nauka and Prichal, were launched as recently as 2021, and there are plans to add more modules this decade. Although the ISS is set to be deorbited in the 2030s, it’s still got plenty to do. It’s actually possible to watch some present-day construction on the ISS. Earlier this month, on 3 December 2022, astronauts Frank Rubio and Josh Cassada installed a new solar array on the space station, and NASA livestreamed the seven-hour operation. You can watch it here on YouTube, or, if you don’t have seven hours to spare, the BBC has condensed a few snippets into a fifty-second video over here. What is the ISS used for? At heart, the ISS is a space laboratory. The experiments conducted there can teach us more about the impact of space radiation, how humans can live in space for long periods, how to create better environments and equipment for astronauts, and how to grow plants in space. Experiments conducted on the ISS can also benefit the people on Earth. The lack of gravity has made it possible to research new methods of delivering cancer treatment, and the ISS SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System (ISERV) was used for Earth photography in 2013 and 2014. In addition to telling us more about our environment, these photographs sometimes captured large-scale disasters and were used to assess how responders could help. The ISS is permanently crewed, which means it’s one of only two places outside Earth you’ll always find humans; the other is the Chinese space station Tiangong. The NASA website keeps track of who’s on the ISS; right now, in late 2022, it’s occupied by Frank Rubio, Nicole Mann, Josh Cassada, Koichi Wakata, Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin and Anna Kikina. Crew members are cycled out on a regular basis, and a mission to the ISS tends to last about six months. The ISS is an exciting place to work, but being in space for long periods can be psychologically difficult, and we’ve written before about the health impact of living in low gravity. How to see the ISS The ISS is moving around our planet at incredible speed, about 400 kilometres above us. It orbits the Earth fifteen times per day at almost 28,000 kilometres per hour, taking just over an hour and a half on each lap. If the ISS happens to be passing overhead shortly after sunset or before sunrise, when the sky is dark but the station isn’t in Earth’s shadow, you can see it just by looking up at the night sky. It’s easy to spot; it’s very high up, very fast-moving and very bright. The NASA website Spot the Station can tell you when and where the station will be visible. Seeing the inside of the ISS in person is a bit trickier, of course. Google has captured Street View imagery of the space station, though, so you can explore it on Google Earth. Remember to look up; there’s no up or down in space, so the ‘ceiling’ is just another wall and often has equipment on it. The future of the ISS The ISS still has years of scientific work ahead of it; if you want to see it overhead, you’ve still got almost a decade to do so. But, unfortunately, it can’t keep working forever. Because it’s in low Earth orbit, the ISS experiences small amounts of atmospheric drag, which slow it down over time. Unlike higher-orbiting satellites, the ISS has to be boosted on a regular basis to keep it in orbit. This means that it can’t just stay in space once it’s stopped fulfilling its role; if we stopped maintaining it, it would fall to Earth before long. It’s potentially dangerous for a satellite to fall out of the sky without a plan in place. Because of this, NASA intends to bring the ISS down to Earth in a more controlled fashion, rather than letting it fall naturally. Once the last crew has left the space station, operators on Earth will drop the ISS into the atmosphere, aiming for the debris that survives the friction of the fall to land around Point Nemo in the South Pacific Ocean: the point in the ocean that’s furthest from solid ground. Hundreds of satellites have already been crashed at this point, far from any inhabited locations. If you’d like to know more about the deorbiting of the ISS, NASA has an FAQ page about the subject. If you’d like to know more about satellite disposal in general, meanwhile, take a look at our article ‘What happens to old satellites?’ Cover image: JAXA/Koichi Wakata Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.

There are no humans on board Artemis I. However, that doesn’t mean the passenger seats are empty. In this post, we take a look at the toys and mannequins aboard the first mission to the moon in fifty years, and at what they might be able to teach us about spaceflight. Learning how to protect astronauts In place of crew, Artemis I has three mannequins on board: Commander Moonikin Campos, Helga and Zohar. Hopefully, these mannequins will be able to tell us more about how to protect astronauts on journeys through space. Moonikin Campos is named after Arturo Campos, who helped safely return the crew of Apollo 13 to Earth in 1970 after one of the spacecraft’s oxygen tanks exploded. Moonikin is wearing the same type of suit human astronauts are expected to wear on later Artemis moon missions, and is strapped into a seat equipped with acceleration and vibration sensors. By measuring the actual acceleration and vibration astronauts will experience on Artemis rockets, engineers will be able to improve the accuracy of vibration tests astronauts go through on Earth. Helga and Zohar’s role is to tell us more about the potential impact of cosmic radiation on astronauts. On Earth, we’re largely protected from space radiation by our planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field. However, astronauts in space don’t have that protection. Moonikin Campos also has two radiation sensors, but Helga and Zohar are designed to give us more detailed information about radiation. Although Helga and Zohar are made of plastic, they’re similar in density to actual human bodies, and they contain small crystals in parts of the body that are particularly vulnerable to radiation. These crystals can gather and store radiation, meaning they can tell us how much radiation the mannequins have been exposed to and where it’s concentrated. Similar mannequins are used in hospitals to inform cancer treatments. Unlike Helga, Zohar is wearing a radiation protection vest, so we’ll also be able to see how much of a difference this equipment makes to radiation exposure. Why is Shaun the Sheep going to the moon? Artemis I has a fourth passenger, who’s a bit of a celebrity: Shaun the Sheep, in toy form. As far as we know, Shaun isn’t equipped with any sensors and won’t be telling us much about radiation. Shaun’s already had a brush with alien life in the film Farmageddon, though, so perhaps that experience has left him wanting to know more about what’s beyond Earth. The European Space Agency (ESA) took Shaun through astronaut training in 2019 in preparation for his role in the film, and were evidently impressed enough by his performance to give him a seat on Artemis I. We also like to think Shaun’s excursion to the moon will help to capture the imagination of the next generation of astronauts. Why is Snoopy going to the moon? Snoopy, the dog from Charles M Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts, is another animal celebrity joining the Artemis I mission. Snoopy is already an experienced astronaut; in 1990, he joined the STS-32 mission and spent about eleven days in space on the space shuttle Columbia. In fact, Snoopy’s history with space goes back even further than that. The lunar module for the May 1969 moon mission Apollo 10 was called Snoopy; the command module was named Charlie Brown, after Snoopy’s owner. Snoopy was used to investigate the planned landing site for Apollo 11, a mission that took place two months later, during which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon. Since 1968, there’s been a tradition within NASA of recognising outstanding achievements with the Silver Snoopy Award: a silver Snoopy pin that’s awarded to NASA employees and contractors by astronauts. Each Snoopy pin has previously been to space, and there are some aboard Artemis I to be issued to future award winners. Snoopy is also aboard Artemis I in the form of a small soft toy, equipped with his own custom-made flight suit; you can see him in this NASA video on YouTube. Unlike his mannequin crewmates, he’s not strapped into a seat, because his role is to serve as a zero gravity indicator. When Snoopy started to float on camera, the mission team watching from Earth knew that Artemis I had reached the apparent weightlessness of microgravity. Being small and soft, he can float around without causing any damage. Paving the way for people Although Artemis I isn’t carrying any people into space, it’s the first in a planned series of missions to bring humanity back to the moon and, ultimately, perhaps to Mars. The universe is a vast and fascinating place, and we’ve barely brushed the fringes of it. We’re looking forward to finding out what we discover by taking the next steps. If these new developments have put you in the mood to look back at the beginnings of space exploration, take a look at our article on Sputnik 1. Cover image: NASA/Joel Kowsky Darwin Innovation Group is a UK-based company that provides services related to autonomous vehicles and communications. If you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our careers page. If you’d like to know how we can help your organisation make use of autonomous vehicles, contact us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.