VLEO refers to orbits between about 100 kilometers and 300 or 400 km (although the exact range depends on who you ask), in contrast to LEO, which starts around 300 or 400 km and extends up to 2,000 km. The first satellites in VLEO were short-lived US spy satellites in the 1960s and 1970s, which dropped their film payloads for mid-air capture by aircraft. It’s probable that their descendants are still dipping into VLEO.
Before architect César Martín Gómez could send his latest thermoelectric experiment to Antarctica in 2018, he had to make sure that soldiers from the Spanish Army could get it right on the first try. In the laboratory, he could always run the experiment—a scale model of a solid-state thermoelectric heater—a second time if it needed troubleshooting.
But at Spain’s Gabriel de Castilla base in the South Shetland Islands, soldiers would be too busy running other civilian experiments to troubleshoot Martín’s for him if it failed. And in a place like Antarctica, the goal of his experiment—providing efficient heat from direct current electricity—was both important and difficult. The experience “forced us to make a jump in quality,” recalls Martín, who is a professor at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain.
In August, Oleksii Kryvobok walked through a green and yellow field of sunflowers south of Kyiv, Ukraine, and measured the harvest’s photosynthetic activity with a device on a tripod. Hundreds of kilometers overhead, the EOS SAT-1 satellite, launched by Kryvobok’s employer, EOS Data Analytics (EOSDA), in Mountain View, California, was making the same measurements from orbit.
The satellite, one of a planned fleet of seven, was joined in orbit in early November by a pair of competing Open Cosmos satellites. EOSDA and Open Cosmos are part of an emerging trend for earth observation (EO) satellites: they aim to use mini-constellations of small satellites to offer specialized EO data in much the same way bigger companies such as Planet and Maxar offer high resolution optical data to customers of all kinds.
On Thursday November 9, Spain got a new government. On that same day, in Madrid, the far-right commentator and Vox party co-founder Alejo Vidal-Quadras was shot in the face, and nobody quite knew what to make of it.