Nebula Public Library

Spacecraft and their payloads are required to meet a casualty risk threshold for uncontrolled re-entries. The requirements demand that consideration be paid to the whole spacecraft and payload in order to achieve an optimised mission that is not penalised, where possible, by the cost of performing a controlled entry. The demisability of the spacecraft bus has received significant attention in recent years, the demisability of payloads has received less focus.

Poor sleep on the ISS remains one of the major factors, which affect negatively the performance and psychological resilience of astronauts. The development of novel effective countermeasures for sleep loss, performance decrements and psychological deficits during space missions is needed.

The Crowd4Sat initiative led by Imperative Space has spanned a wide range of subject matter in Earth observation and astronomy, to test the opportunities for using citizen science and crowdsourcing (CS) in relation to data originated from satellite platforms, and to develop new workflows and techniques for rapidly incorporating data into CS platforms and generating useable results. Our particular CS approach focussed predominantly on the use of ‘human pattern recognition’, utilising established image sorting and classification platforms.