TalTech Space Centre

10/02/2023

Last week our team member Tanel Neemre had the amazing opportunity to attend the ESA Academy’s Space Systems Engineering Course 2023 in Belgium alongside 30 university students from 16 different nationalities.🤩

✨A series of lectures and practical exercises led by ESA experts were covered throughout the four days of teaching at ESEC-Galaxia. During this time the team concentrated on the Mars Sample Return Mission, working on the mission requirements, top-level design, concept of operations, trade-offs, systems budgets and margins along with risk management and launch and early operations.

✨Along with the lengthy study sessions, the group had the chance to tour ESEC-Redu ground station and mission control center of the European Space Agency.

31/01/2023

Today in space history
✨1958: With the first successful launch of a satellite, Explorer 1 the United States entered the Space Age. It obtained cosmic radiation measurements and led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belt.
✨1971 - Apollo 14 launch

Images credit: NASA

27/01/2023

Last week three of our team members attended the Finnish Satellite Workshop (https://spaceworkshop.fi/) where they enjoyed scientific and industry talks for 3 days. Super cool event and lots to learn about again.🤩
Most interesting things they discovered/heard/experienced:
1. Meeting a lot of Tartu Observatory people and learning about their research
2. Hearing straight from ESA representatives, what are the current hot topics and what the future holds
3. How fins are building their satellites, Aalto-1,2,3 and Foresail-1,2
4. Latest research on Earth observation(EO), radio science, data analysis and industry tendencies
5. Space debris is a real problem, there is >50% chance there will be unusable orbits in LEO in the next 10-30 years

17/01/2023

Check out another successful SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch which marked the first mission of the year for the military branch. It was exciting to see that the side boosters landed back at the launch site successfully, which is a great demonstration of the reliability and versatility of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket and its ability to support a range of missions for different customers. 🤩

SpaceX is targeting Sunday, January 15 at 5:56 p.m. ET (22:56 UTC) for Falcon Heavy’s launch of the USSF-67 mission to a geosynchronous Earth orbit from Lau...

10/01/2023

Let's look back at ten breathtaking photographs from space that were captured in 2022. 🤩

A number of amazing shots of Earth were captured from space in 2022. Here are some of our favorites.

02/01/2023

Happy new year everybody! This year is going to bring a lot of new things to TalTech. Space topics are really hot and we are having our say in this. But we are not the only cool missions happening this year. Check out this list of 12 most exciting space missions of 2023!🤩

2023 will see the launch of new rockets, the return of OSIRIS-REx, and a mission to Jupiter that could help us find extraterrestrial life.

29/12/2022

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are both on the frontier of commercial spaceflight. They both want to disrupt the industry and change the access to space. Last week, ETV aired a French documentary on their confrontation. Make sure to check it out! 🤩

Kaks maailma rikkaimat meest Jeff Bezos ja Elon Musk on käivitanud kosmoseprogrammid, mis lubavad viia inimese teistele planeetidele. Bezos pakub turismireise kosmosse, Musk kavatseb 30 aasta jooksul Marsile lennata. Kui president Trump otsustas ameeriklased taas Kuule saata, võistlesid kaks konku...

27/12/2022

Today in space history
✨1968: Apollo 8 Returns from the Moon
✨1984: The meteorite ALH 84001 is discovered by an American meteorite hunting team in the Allan Hills area of Antarctica. It was discovered that this meteorite originated from Mars.

21/12/2022

What is Attitude Determination and Control System?🧐
The ADCS or Attitude Determination and Control System is part of the satellite which is responsible for keeping the desired orientation of the satellite, for example the side with a camera towards Earth. For that, the ADCS contains sensors for determining the orientation of the satellite, and actuators for changing the orientation.
--Reio, ADCS team member

14/12/2022

Markus Maalt and Anna Maria Tuberg visited Glasgow to attend PocketQube Workshop. It was the first time for us at the biggest PQ workshop to date. We met many people from different countries. Some were developing their first qubes as us, some had already launched a full constellation.

We chatted with people from Hungary, Romania, Netherlands, Germany, UK etc. There were people from Delft, Bradford, Bucharest and other universities, multiple space tech start-ups like IENAI SPACE, quub, Hello Space and many others.

We learned about different ADCS configurations and their advantages. How does launching work, what requirements are absolutely critical, how does integration look like and who orchestrates it all. PQs can have propulsion and change it's orbit. Many companies are interested in PQ format since it is cheap to develop, has already a community and is modular.

The highlight of the event was the introduction to the pocketqube's welcoming community in which members are always open to sharing their knowledge and experiences on orbit. Thank you PocketQube workshop for bringing together all these people!

We also had an amazing chance to witness the ROM-Space pocketqube's intergration to orbital deployer. This is the last time the team sees their spacecraft before it gets launched into orbit. Amazing young talents!

12/12/2022

What does our COM team do?🧐
The purpose of Communication subsystem, shortly just COM, is to allow the communication between the satellite on Earth orbit and ground station in our university campus. Ground station wants to tell the satellite what it should do, or in other words send telecommands to it. Sometimes we also must make software updates to the satellite just like they are made to your laptop or smartphone. In other direction we want to download photos made by satellite camera and also measure the general status and “health” of our small cube. Later information is also known as telemetry.
-- Ivo, COM team member

07/12/2022

Last week TalTech space center went to Robotex international to introduce our project. We were happy to meet so many small and big curious people.🤩
See you next year!✨