No one had ever lost 26 satellites at once until a launch failure bit Planet Labs last year temporarily setting back the San Francisco startup’s ambition to map the globe every day Adding to the sting of last year’s Antares rocket crash in Virginia Planet Labs lost another eight spacecraft aboard a failed launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster in June at least for the little robots Planet Labs is constructing and deploying around the planet to survey every part of Earth with unparalleled regularity With a fresh batch of shoebox-sized craft now safely aboard the International Space Station after launching Aug Planet Labs is ready to take a big step in recovering from losing two cadres of Earth observing satellites in the last year A display commemorating last October’s explosive Antares accident — complete with a haunting image of the Antares rocket immersed in a fireball — hangs in the lobby of Planet Labs headquarters in downtown San Francisco Wreckage of the Planet Labs birds scoured from the Wallops Island beach near the Antares launch pad sits on a rack in a corner of the company’s workshop The group of 14 satellites launched by the HTV puts Planet Labs over the century mark The successful delivery makes it 101 Planet Labs satellites successfully placed into orbit — some have already re-entered — and the latest group will be ejected this fall from pods mounted to the space station’s Japanese robotic arm go through design overhauls every few months The craft are based on the CubeSat form factor and engineers have figured out how to pack powerful new technologies inside the CubeSat’s compact dimensions With high-speed data links to beam back images to a network of ground stations around the globe the satellites are now on their 12th generation The newest set of Doves awaiting deployment from the International Space Station’s Japanese airlock carry upgraded cameras to snap sharper From the space station’s 250-mile-high orbit the Earth-pointing telescopes on each Dove satellite can resolve objects on the ground as small as 2.4 meters Planet Labs plans to eventually deploy a larger fleet in sun-synchronous orbit which is better positioned for imaging Earth under consistent lighting conditions Founded in 2010 and backed by Bay Area venture capital firms Planet Labs set its goal to image the entire planet every day The company says it needs more than 100 satellites for the task and officials say they have not wavered after the launch failures “With a quarterly launch schedule across a network of international partners we will reach our goal of imaging the entire Earth Planet Labs’ co-founder and chief executive in the aftermath of SpaceX’s June 28 launch failure More Doves are manifested to blast off on the next SpaceX cargo launch to the space station and aboard Orbital ATK’s next Cygnus resupply freighter Both missions are due for launch before the end of the year adding to the several dozen Planet Labs birds currently in orbit The Dove deployments from the space station are arranged through NanoRacks a Houston-based company set up to pursue the commercial exploitation of space Planet Labs has raised $183 million in funding with the end of its Series C round of financing in April The company announced in July its acquisition of BlackBridge which runs the five-satellite RapidEye constellation adding more imaging capacity and a data catalog to Planet Labs’ pipeline Spaceflight Now recently visited with Chris Boshuizen Planet Labs’ co-founder and chief technology officer at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco Boshuizen discussed the Planet Labs manufacturing philosophy the company’s response to the Antares crash and the dynamics of the small satellite market Excerpts from the interview are posted below Q: You have launched a lot of satellites over the last couple of years How does your process differ from the way more traditional operators work A: “We do a cycle about once every three months — about eight to 14 weeks on average A traditional NASA mission uses a systems engineering philosophy I call BDUP — Big Design Up Front — so you spend some amount of time whether it be something like LADEE or something like James Webb (Space Telescope) and then finally you have a PDR and CDR (preliminary design review and critical design review) and you finally get to start building stuff The last part for most missions is pretty quick the manufacturing and AIT (assembly integration and test) happens pretty quickly and you’ve never really touched the hardware until the very end of the cycle.” has gone by with many of the risks pushed to the back ‘I think the structure is a bit light maybe we’ll change these software modes or we need to add solar power.’ It’s this endless cycle which is part of what drives the much higher costs of these missions What we did is instead of having a set of requirements designing the satellite and then launching once and try to understand what our real requirements are and which things are required and what doesn’t really matter.'” and the reference design was to have satellites that could image the whole Earth every day — all land areas — and download that within one day with one-day latency The field-of-view would be big enough that with a reasonable number of satellites “We try and run the company a little bit like a software company The goal is to release sequential products that release more of those features until you have a feature-complete design and we’re actually operating a feature-complete satellite.” Q: What sort of upgrades have you added to the missions since the first one in 2013 That was about 30 percent feature complete and could only point at the Earth when the magnetic field was pointing at the Earth because we were field-stabilized.” and that added some new features like a high-speed radio so we could get more than one image per day It had flip-out solar panels so we could get more power Those three things were added between Generations 5 and 6.” “Generation 10 was what was sort of really our first stable bus we had the CONOPS pretty much nailed and understood Generation 10 is about 90 percent feature complete There are just a couple of small details now We’re doing prototypes for those now.” “Generation 12 is our first feature upgrade The camera was the first thing we settled on with Generation 1 Generation 12 has us going back to the beginning now we’ve got to the end of the road What are our next enhancements?’ So we’re looking at an improved camera with better image quality.” A: “It’s essentially the same resolution just overall nicer and crisper images.” Q: What is your ground station network like A: “We have about 10 ground stations around the world in X-band our radio speed is right now about 40 megabits a second I think the mission lifetime record for a CubeSat We’re now doing 2 gigabytes per pass one of the spacecraft from the University of Michigan That was a pretty good satellite by CubeSat standards.” “Our record to date has been 3.5 gigabytes in a single pass and people were saying they thought X-band radio in a CubeSat was impossible We already have a really thriving business We’ve got more in signed contracts now than we’ve raised in VC money We’re shipping data to the customers and feedback from the customers has been extraordinary They’re able to do things they’ve never been able to do before because of our broad coverage and frequent updates.” we want to image the whole world every day and that does have a minimum number of satellites We think the minimum for that is somewhere around 100 to 125 The exact number changes if you want to add in redundancy We want them to eventually go into one orbital plane in sun-synchronous orbit It sort of creates a line scanner for the world.” that constellation will provide a game-changing capability where you can do day-to-day change detection and discover things that you don’t know about even finding like a landslide in a remote area that no one knew about that’s the kind of thing I think we can do when we have daily updates That’s extraordinarily valuable for business For humanitarian and environmental applications “We’re partnering with non-profits land ownership and protection of indigenous land rights One of the things that we’re obligated to do as part of our imaging license is to distribute data in times of need and disaster We distributed data to relief agencies under a creative commons license after the Nepal earthquake (in April) That’s the first really big real-time response we’ve been able to help with and I’m very proud of the fact that we were able to help there.” Q: It seems like there is no shortage of announcements for new small satellite constellations Is there any concern about this trend generating more space debris A: “I think that’s become possible The community’s comfort with that has been growing We obviously need to set very firm codes of conduct to ensure that the commons of space is respected we realize that being the first to do this we have to set the best example of what best practices are and we don’t want to be the company to mess it up for everybody.” “We have very strict debris mitigation policies Our principle response to that is to launch into very low orbits that self-clean which is why we use the ISS for a lot of our demonstrations One of the big aspects is community sharing of information so its going to be really key that everybody has up-to-date and accurate orbital information on their assets.” “We publish our own satellite ephemeris back to JSPOC (the U.S military’s Joint Space Operations Center) and Space Track and make that freely available to anybody else to track our satellites and do their own conjunction analyses with their own assets I think this free sharing of information is important creating the culture that it is OK to share and that the needs of the community to know where everything is outweigh the needs for privacy.” A: They’re about the size of a bottle of wine I call them enhanced CubeSats because we broke most of the specification but we still fit in a more or less standard dispenser just with a few modifications to fit the camera and stuff We’re right at the limit of the spec in most regards.” Q: Do you see Planet Labs growing beyond the CubeSat form factor in the future I think one of the fun things about our iteration approach is every time we’ve added a new feature and we put some new component in there like the reaction wheels then in the next generation we re-factor the design and improve its manufacturability Generation 10 has as many free cavities in it as Generation 1 did is about double the free space as Generation 10 because we did a nice job repackaging things We’re very far from the end of the road from what I think we can do with a CubeSat.” they’re like we really need to get price per kilogram down But my view is you don’t want to launch dumb mass so you actually want to increase your capability per unit mass You end up with capability per unit launched and not mass because dumb mass has still got mass.” I think the Planet Labs satellites might be 5 kilograms of really dense computation capacity so I think we have a long way to go.” Q: Your plans call for an operational fleet in sun-synchronous orbit so is there future use of ISS by Planet Labs A: “I think the ISS is awesome for gap-filling and capability extension and we will continue to iterate and to fill that box with everything we can possibly fill it with We’re still going to need regular access to space I think we’ll just launch smaller fleets to test out new ideas from the ISS the satellites will just burn up and clean themselves up.” Q: How are sun-synchronous satellites at higher altitudes compliant with the standard 25-year de-orbit guidelines we want to launch our operational fleet into a very low sun-synchronous orbit you’re compliant with the 25 to 30-year de-orbit rule so we certainly would never launch any higher than 700 You’re still talking upwards of 20 years at 650 you’re more like four to seven years so that’s our way of playing it very safe resolution is linearly proportional with altitude so the images are 30 percent sharper at 500 than 650 kilometers.” Q: What is your resolution from the altitude of ISS the ground sampling distance is something like 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) and it’s slightly less — around 3 meters (9.8 feet) Q: What was the mood here when you lost 26 satellites on Antares A: “I think people handled it pretty well We have this great photo of the crowd gasping in shock with the explosion reflected off the window behind them in some sense it was a vindication or validation of our approach which is that we have redundancy and safety in numbers So I’d say overall the business has not suffered but our fleet size is smaller than we would want right now We have to be more careful with the satellites we’ve got so we’ve definitely been pinched operationally and had to pay a lot more attention to the satellites we have I didn’t appreciate that back then at the time of the explosion — that there would probably be some type of cost to us down the road.” Q: Did NanoRacks give you a free re-launch but they were pretty damn good about hustling and getting things ready in time We built two satellites in nine days in response to the explosion to carry critical new tech demos of new features I wanted to test I think we had four experimental satellites on the Antares that were destroyed combined the tech demos down to just two satellites and shipped them to NanoRacks in nine days They were able to get them on SpaceX-5 (a resupply mission in January 2015) and we’ve got a lot of good tech demo data from them.” If you look at current space insurance premiums they’re like something between 10 and 12 percent so you’re assuming one in 10 launches fails Q: With launch delays being part of the space business A: “We make satellites here on site in San Francisco and it was all hands on deck to make the shipment deadline we just make them with a steady state production line and we pump out about five per week.” Q: What are your thoughts on dedicated launchers for nanosatellites Does a business like Planet Labs need that A: “I think it’s super useful.” the most useful thing is quick turnaround time for testing new ideas and NanoRacks get them manifested just in time to make the late-load stocking the Dragon or the Cygnus capsule you’re still waiting for an opportunity for an airlock cycle That can take anywhere from a month to three months.” You obviously don’t want to pay 10 times the price but I think there’s a common misconception that nanolaunch also has to be cheaper per kilogram I don’t know how those two things got conflated If there was a company that could do regular high-volume launches — 100 satellites a month or something — and just keep doing it forever But it would have to use commodity pricing Q: What price for a dedicated launcher makes sense anywhere between $200,000 to $450,000 across all families of rockets Those are the prices I’ve seen throughout my career The misconception is that nanolaunch also has to change the price per launch equation It’s not like nanolaunch has to come in at $100,000 or $50,000 per satellite Even if they were still in the $200,000 to $400,000 range that would be a fair market price for a quick turnaround launcher.” so we don’t actually know what their payload fraction is going to be That would be an entire cadre of tech demos I could launch in one go I’d get a lot of value learning about how those satellites did if I wanted to learn something really important to feed into a future sun-synchronous launch It would be worth it for me to do it — to launch one satellite to get information I needed to buy down risk for a future launch Anywhere in the $200,000 to $400,000 range would be fair for a one-off launch.” A: “Just shipping product to customers and then growing our capacity to get towards daily coverage That’s where we’re at right now.” Email the author Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1 When the countdown hit zero last Friday and the engines powering a previously flown Falcon 9 first stage roared to life for takeoff, the four astronauts strapped into a SpaceX Crew Dragon some 21 stories up started laughing. Frank Culbertson, a former shuttle and station astronaut and now head of Orbital ATK’s space systems group, spoke with Spaceflight Now’s Stephen Clark on the sidelines of the 2015 International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight. A video purportedly showing a gunman attempting to rob a store, only to be confronted (and shot) by several gun-carrying customers is frequently shared by pro-gun groups on social media with the caption: "Armed suspect robs convenience store gets shot by every customer inside": The video footage of the incident (which can be glimpsed at the bottom of this article) is real but it is often shared with incomplete or inaccurate information This incident was captured by a security camera at a pharmacy in Brazil the "customers" seen pulling their weapons in this video were actually plainclothes police officers The crime took place around 9 PM at a pharmacy on Avenida Afonso Pena The video shows the robber entering the store wearing a helmet he points his gun at the woman behind the counter it is possible to see that one of the policemen notices what is occurring and shoots the young robber who drops his gun and then falls to the ground a mobile emergency service unit (Samu) went to the scene he already had a record involving several different crimes the Military Police's communications adviser reported that the four military police officers involved in the case appeared before the police station "with their respective firearms which were made available to the competent authority." the case will be investigated by the 2nd Police District of Itumbiara and it is not yet known how many police officers shot the youth This security footage (as well as a second angle of the shooting) can be glimpsed in a video news report from Globo 1:   "Thug Tries to Rob Store Where Every Person Inside Was Armed."     Concealed Nation   "Menor é Morto por Policiais à Paisana ao Assaltar Farmácia de Itumbiara; Veja Vídeo."     1 June 2017 This material may not be reproduced without permission Snopes and the Snopes.com logo are registered service marks of Snopes.com The 32-year-old was playing in his first competitive match in just over a year after he needed surgery on a knee injury picked up playing for Milan in February last year Ronaldo came on as a 68th-minute substitute and may play again on Sunday against Corinthians' traditional rivals Palmeiras in the state championship "It was a good debut for Ronaldo," Corinthians coach Mano Menezes said "He moved well and even tried some of the moves that are typical of him It was a first step important to overcome and with time things should become easier We will talk to him and see how he felt." The three-time world player of the year was surrounded by photographers and reporters from the moment he arrived at the stadium and even on the sideline he struggled to avoid reporters He was surrounded as he came off the field but left without talking to the media Ronaldo has twice before come back from serious knee surgeries. In 1999, he tore up his right knee with Internazionale and needed surgery, and a year later he twisted the same knee and was sidelined for several months after more surgery. He recovered in time to help Brazil win the World Cup in 2002 in South Korea and Japan He was the tournament's top scorer with eight goals in seven matches including two in the final against Germany Ronaldo hadn't played a match with a Brazilian club in Brazil since 1994, when he was still with Cruzeiro. He transferred to PSV Eindhoven that same year, then eventually moved to Barcelona, Inter Milan He joined Corinthians in December and has taken nearly three months to reach match fitness Photo from the newlyweds' personal archive Not even as a newlywed does Lucas Lepri pass up the chance to compete the Minas Gerais native landed in Brazil on the 26th of last month to wed his bride Mayara in Itumbiara Michael Langhi and the gang from Alliance in São Paulo by Monday to train for the World League Pro tournament on December 5th and 6th Lepri added another lightweight title to his CV and fattened up his bank account by three thousand reais In making it to the top of the winners’ podium In the first match he finished with a forearm choke from a guard pass and in the final he came up against a game Moacir Mendes would hit the ground and get right back up but it was great to be champion,” Lepri told GRACIEMAG.com Lepri’s performance drew praise from all at Alliance: “Lepri left Fabio Gurgel gawking passed some really tricky guards like a knife through butter,” said friend and black belt Elan Santiago “His wife stuck a wedding band on him that’s like something out of Lord of the Rings All he has to do is take it off to train and alarm bells go off at home I think there’s some kind of GPS chip in it,” chides the friend And Lepri confirms the tight watch his wife is keeping on him Pragmatic88Slot Gacor Brazilians can choose an exchange in Egypt São Paulo – International organization AFS Intercultural Programs has opened applications for Brazilian students to study in Egypt for a month The opportunity is focused on students exceling in science engineering and math (STEM) and is supported by BP natural gas and renewable energies company The BP Global Stem Academies program is in its third edition and involves students from several countries. Applications are open until March 9, 2020 in the AFS website Ten Brazilian students will be chosen to go to one of three destinations – Egypt The interchange will run in July and aims to prepare the young students in the STEM topics The selection includes an online phase and an interview with AFS team the participants will interact with professionals of STEM areas; visit oil refineries and alternative energy facilities; and attend geology The students will stay in local family homes have Arabic classes,” AFS communication and marketing coordinator to Brazil Spots are distributed by the Brazilian regions where BP operates Four scholarships are offered to the state of Amapá; two for Ituiutaba (Ituiutaba e Gurinhatã) Minas Gerais; two for Itumbiara (Itumbiara and Cachoeira Dourada) Goiás; and another two for the so-called Tropical region (Edeia And there are also spots reserved for BP employees’ children the exchange program participants are expected to produce a video or text on the experience and concepts of programming and microbiology We worked on projects focused on the UN Sustainable Goals I can see now that my intercultural skills have developed much further,” student Emanuelle Morais (pictured above) reported on her testimony; she participated in the exchange program in Cairo in 2019 AFS offers spots for foreign students to come to Brazil the institution welcomed 37 scholarship winners from over 20 different countries “The students stay at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte wind and thermal plants in Rio Grande do Norte,” Laplana explained The Egyptian selection has no restriction on cities or states the students must live. The application form is on AFS Egypt website Professionals will be hired all over the world to fly Boeing and Airbus aircraft A roadshow is set to take place in São Paulo in June The Brazil-Arab News Agency (ANBA) is the news website of the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce Its goal is to promote communication between Brazilians and Arabs This article was published more than 12 years ago A view of the Itumbiara hydroelectric dam in central Brazil The dam is running at only 9 per cent of capacity due to low water levels caused by one of the worst droughts in Brazil’s history The country’s energy demand is expected to grow another 50 per cent by 2020.UESLEI MARCELINO/Reuters BC Hydro says its proposed $7.9-billion Site C hydroelectric dam in northeastern British Columbia will flood agricultural land and force some landowners off their property but overall the project should proceed because it's in the best interests of the province The Crown-owned public utility submitted its environmental impact statement Monday to federal and provincial review bodies that must now conduct a joint environmental review process that includes public hearings and will be followed by a decision on the future of the project 40-section submission to the federal Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and the provincial British Columbia Environmental Assessment Office is the result of five years of studying the potential effects of the dam and proposed measures to avoid or mitigate the impacts we believe that even looking at the things that can't be mitigated that the project should move forward because it's in the best interest for the province of British Columbia," said David Conway Hydro's Site C community relations spokesman Hydro's Site C Clean Energy Project would be the third dam and hydroelectric generating station on the Peace River in B.C.'s northeast The utility's energy forecasts indicate customer demand for electricity is expected to increase by about 40 per cent over the next 20 years with Site C projected to supply enough energy to power 465,000 homes for 100 years Report an editorial error Report a technical issue Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s comment community. 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