The Artemis II wet dress rehearsal will simulate the final 10-minute countdown multiple times, including planned holds and restarts, to verify rocket and ground team procedures.

Downlink assignments are typically allocated to the lower portion of a band because of lower atmospheric attenuation, while uplinks occupy higher frequencies to support higher data rates.

External low-noise amplifiers and anti-aliasing filters are required to preserve signal fidelity and prevent spectral folding during analog-to-digital conversion.

The primary objective of satellite signal monitoring is to ensure the integrity of space-to-ground and ground-to-space links, including verifying link quality, detecting unintentional or malicious interference, and ensuring compliance with spectrum regulations.

Monitoring systems must choose a sampling frequency that places the signal of interest within a single Nyquist zone and suppresses out-of-band components with analog filtering.

Direct sampling of satellite C-band signals typically requires minimum sampling rates of about 8 GSPS assuming appropriate bandpass filtering.

Teledyne SP Devices produces the ADQ35-WB digitizer that supports direct sampling of L-band and S-band satellite signals without frequency mixers.

Extracting Galileo subbands from L-band acquisitions significantly reduces downstream data transmission rates to levels manageable by modern GPUs.

Different GNSS constellations use different subband nomenclatures, for example Galileo uses the designation 'E' within the L band instead of the 'L' nomenclature used by other GNSS constellations.

RAID configurations built from NVMe SSDs connected via PCIe carrier cards allow parallel writes across multiple drives, achieving write bandwidths of tens of gigabytes per second and total capacities at petabyte scale.

Direct sampling of satellite L-band signals typically requires minimum sampling rates of about 2 GSPS assuming appropriate bandpass filtering.

Onboard FPGA preprocessing is used to reduce raw data rates from wideband digitizers before transfer over PCIe links.

PCIe-based architectures are preferred for real-time and near-real-time satellite RF analysis workloads.

Combining wideband digitization, FPGA preprocessing, GPU acceleration, and PCIe-connected scalable storage provides a flexible and cost-effective architecture for satellite RF intelligence systems.

Direct sampling of satellite S-band signals typically requires minimum sampling rates of about 4 GSPS assuming appropriate bandpass filtering.

The ADQ35-WB digitizer has 12-bit resolution and an usable input bandwidth up to 9 GHz.

Peer-to-peer data transfer over PCIe enables digitizers to transmit data directly to GPUs via DMA, bypassing the host CPU and system memory.

Satellite services operate on designated radiofrequency bands that are subdivided into subbands for uplink and downlink directions in two-way systems to minimize mutual interference.

A single wideband digitizer channel sampling at 10 GSPS with two bytes per sample generates approximately 20 GB/s of raw data.

GPUs perform computationally intensive tasks for RF monitoring such as channelization, demodulation, and long-term statistical analysis.

NASA and JAXA studies indicate an orbital solar plant can generate upwards of 13 times more energy annually than an identical installation on the ground.

In Low Earth Orbit, solar panels are exposed to the solar constant of approximately 1,361 Watts per square meter of unfiltered radiant power.

Declining launch costs enabled by platforms like SpaceX Starship are making orbital solar energy increasingly economically viable for global baseload power.

Space engineers prioritize specific power measured in Watts per kilogram for space solar arrays.

Sunlight passing through the Earth's atmosphere is scattered and absorbed by water vapor, greenhouse gases, and aerosols.

Terrestrial solar systems avoid the conversion losses associated with beaming electricity from space because they connect directly to a physical grid.

Direct normal irradiance at the Earth's surface on a clear, dry day rarely exceeds 1,000 W/m².

Orbital solar arrays must convert electricity into microwaves or lasers to beam power to Earth, which introduces conversion losses.

Terrestrial solar systems can lose 55% to 60% of incident energy before it reaches a photovoltaic cell when cloud cover and air pollution are factored in.

Companies such as Solestial and Rocket Lab target power-to-mass ratios exceeding 500–800 W/kg for high-efficiency thin-film flexible space arrays.

A typical high-performance solar farm in the Mojave Desert averages about 5 to 9 full-sun-equivalent hours of energy production per day.

Low Earth Orbit orbital arrays can be positioned to collect power for about 99% of the year depending on altitude and inclination such as a sun-synchronous terminator orbit.

The ₹6,375.92 crore capital expenditure allocation is a jump of over ₹1,000 crore compared to the revised estimates of the previous fiscal year.

Lt. Gen. A.K. Bhatt (retd) is the Director General of the Indian Space Association (ISpA).

On February 1, 2026 Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented India’s Union Budget for 2026-27 and allocated ₹13,705.63 crore (approximately $1.64 billion) to the Department of Space.

The 2026-27 Union Budget signals a transition for India’s space program from preparatory planning to the build phase of hardware realization.

Of the Department of Space’s total outlay for 2026-27, ₹6,375.92 crore is dedicated to capital expenditure.

The 2026-27 Union Budget targets expansion of India’s astrophysics scientific base by upgrading or establishing the National Large Solar Telescope, the National Large Optical-Infrared Telescope, the Himalayan Chandra Telescope, and the COSMOS 2 Planetarium.

The Department of Space allocation in the 2026-27 Union Budget represents a 2% increase over the previous year’s budget estimate.

Industry bodies ISpA and SIA-India identified several indirect triggers in the 2026-27 Union Budget intended to accelerate India’s domestic private space ecosystem.

The 2026-27 Union Budget does not include a direct fiscal ‘space manufacturing’ package.

The NASA 2026 Reauthorization bill ties commercial human lunar landing systems to NASA’s Moon-to-Mars roadmap and Artemis missions.

CesiumAstro plans to build a new 270,000-square-foot headquarters as part of its scale-up following the Series C funding round.

CesiumAstro intends to expand manufacturing capacity and accelerate deployment of its software-defined, AI-enabled space communications platforms worldwide using the Series C proceeds.

SpaceX conducted 62 Starlink launches in the first half of 2025.

NASA signed a mission order with Axiom Space for the fifth private astronaut mission (PAM) to the International Space Station, marking the fifth consecutive such award by the agency.

Heat pipe manufacturers can produce 200 to 300 units annually while constellation demand sits at 600 to 1,000 units.

The NASA 2026 Reauthorization bill directs NASA to specify its research, development, and operational requirements in low Earth orbit and share those requirements with U.S. industry to support commercial space stations and private platforms as the backbone of U.S. LEO operations after the ISS retirement.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn is slated to fly for the third time in late February to deploy the BlueBird 7 communications satellite for AST SpaceMobile.

New Shepard has launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads from students, academia, research organizations, and NASA.