satellites

There are thousands of artificial satellites orbiting Earth, carrying out tasks from navigation to enabling communications to wildfire monitoring. What happens when a satellite reaches the end of its life, though?

There are two main ways old satellites are disposed of: they’re brought back to Earth, or they’re sent further away. We’re going to take a look at those disposal methods here.

In November 2021, Darwin and ESA collaborated on a connectivity test at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. We spoke to Darwin’s Rodrigo Barreto and ESA’s Antonio Franchi to get some insight into this test.

Since the 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, satellites have revolutionised the world. Even people who don’t work with satellites still use them on a daily basis for tasks like navigation and watching television.

There’s one particularly interesting satellite function we didn’t go into in our article on the applications of satellites, and that’s the way satellites are used to save lives. We’re going to take a look at that in this post.

Satellites are fantastically useful tools, and there are thousands of them in orbit around the Earth right now. Before the current age of satellites could come into being, though, someone had to take the first step.

In today’s post, we’re taking a look at the early history of satellites, and in particular at Sputnik 1: the first artificial satellite in space.

Darwin’s ubiquitous communications technology makes it possible to switch in an instant between 5G and satellite communications. Why is this important? In this post, we explore some of the reasons it’s worth supplementing 5G communications with satellite networks.