Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd

Type	Private
Founded	1985
Location	Guildford, Surrey
Key people	Professor Sir Martin Sweeting: Chief Executive Officer
Industry	Aerospace
Products	Satellites and related services
Revenue	£30m turnover, £1.5m pre-tax profit expected for FY 2006
Employees	200+
Website	www.sstl.co.uk

Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, or SSTL, is a spin-off company of the University of Surrey that builds and operates small satellites. Its satellites began as amateur radio satellites known by the UoSAT (University of Surrey SATELLITE) designation. SSTL cooperates with the University's Surrey Space Centre, which does research into satellite and space topics. Image File history File links Sstl. ... A private company is a company that is independently owned. ... See also Guildford, Western Australia and Guildford, British Columbia. ... Aerospace engineering is the branch of engineering that concerns aircraft, spacecraft and related topics. ... For other uses, please see Satellite (disambiguation) A satellite is an object that orbits another object (known as its primary). ... Revenue is a US business term for the amount of money that a company can receive from its activities, mostly from sales of products and/or services to customers. ... Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. ... The front page of the English Wikipedia Website. ... University of Surrey The University of Surrey (UniS) received its charter on September 9, 1966, and was at that time situated near Battersea Park in south-west London. ... Miniaturized satellites are recent artificial satellites of unusually low weights and small sizes, new classifications are used to categorieze these satellites. ... Mrs. ... A satellite is any object that orbits another object (which is known as its primary). ... Layers of Atmosphere - not to scale (NOAA) Outer space, also called just space, refers to the relatively empty regions of the Universe outside the atmospheres of celestial bodies. ...

Recently SSTL has moved into remote sensing services with the launch of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) and its associated company. SSTL also adopted the Internet Protocol for the DMC satellites it builds and operates, migrating from use of the AX.25 protocol popular in amateur radio. The CLEO Cisco router in Low Earth Orbit, onboard the UK-DMC satellite along with a network of payloads, takes advantage of this adoption of the Internet Protocol. The Internet Protocol (IP) is a data-oriented protocol used by source and destination hosts for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork. ... AX.25 is a data link layer protocol derived from the X.25 protocol suite and designed for use by amateur radio operators. ... Mrs. ... CLEO - Cisco router in Low Earth Orbit, is an Internet router from Cisco Systems that was integrated into the UK-DMC Disaster Monitoring Constellation satellite built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) as a secondary experimental payload, and launched into space with the satellite from Plesetsk on 27 September 2003. ...

SSTL recently built TopSat alongside the latest DMC satellite, the Chinese Beijing-1, and launched them together from Plesetsk on 27 October 2005. SSTL built the first experimental and demonstration satellite for the Galileo positioning system, GIOVE-A, launched from Baikonur on 28 December 2005. SSTL is building the spacecraft platforms for RapidEye. TopSat (Tactical Operational Satellite) is an earth observation satellite that was launched on October 27, 2005 by a Cosmos rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia. ... Cyclone-3 rocket launching Meteor-3 satellite (Plesetsk, August 15, 1991) Plesetsk Cosmodrome is a Russian spaceport, located about 800 km north of Moscow and south of Arkhangelsk (coordinates vary in different sources, but 62°08′ N 41°01′ E seems plausible). ... The Galileo positioning system is a proposed satellite navigation system, to be built by the European Union (EU) as an alternative to the US military-controlled Global Positioning System and the Russian GLONASS. The system should be operational by 2010, two years later than originally anticipated. ... GIOVE is the name for each satellite in a set of four being built to validate the Galileo positioning system in orbit. ... RapidEye is a commercial multispectral remote sensing satellite mission being designed and implemented by MDA for RapidEye AG. The RapidEye sensor images five optical bands in the 400-850nm range and provides 5m pixel size at nadir. ...

SSTL works with the British National Space Centre and takes on a number of tasks for the BNSC that would be done in-house by a traditional large government space agency. The University sold a 10% share of SSTL to SpaceX in January 2005. The British National Space Centre (or BNSC) is a voluntary partnership between eleven UK government departments and research councils. ... The Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) is an El Segundo, California space transportation startup company whose stated goal is to improve the cost and reliability of access to space ultimately by a factor of ten. SpaceX is developing a family of mostly reusable two stage, kerosene/liquid oxygen launch vehicles. ...

External links

• Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd
  
• Surrey Space Centre
  
• DMC International Imaging

Some SSTL satellites:

• Description of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation from the Earth Observation Portal
  

Snap-1 nanosatellite
FASat-Alfa
A Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd / Surrey Space Centre, 6. ... FASat-Alfa was to become the first Chilean satellite, and was constructed under a Technology Transfer Program between the Chilean Air Force (FACH) and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) of the United Kingdom. ...