South Africa is planning to build a third satellite, and hopes to have it launched by 2013.

The satellite is named Sumbandila, from the Venda language spoken in the north of the country, and means “lead the way.” It would be the second of its kind.Gladys Magagula, South Africa’s only female mission control specialist, said she was looking forward to the new satellite.South Africa’s only existing micro earth observa-tion satellite, SumbandilaSat1, has been giving out the silent treatment since July, which was the last time it communicated with the Hartebeesthoek ground station.

“When the power to the magnetic interface shut down, there was no communication,” said Magagula.When the southern hemisphere summer hits its solar panels, engineers are hoping that the batteries will charge up sufficiently to allow communications to re-establish.Either way, the engineers have a plan, said Khalid Manjoo, from the South African satellite company SunSpace, located in Stellenbosch, a university town about an hour’s drive away from the International As-tronautical Congress venue.“We will incorporate the lessons we learnt in the first satellite into the new one,” explained Manjoo, who is the team leader of assembly integration and testing

South AfricA to deSign Another SAtellite?

at SunSpace.“Preparations to build a revamped SumbandilaSat2 have already started,” he said.Manjoo was speaking yesterday at the twelfth United Nations/International Astronautical Association workshop at the service of developing countries.Once the proposed satellite gets approval from the South African government, it could take a year to build. The likelihood is that the next satellite will be ready by 2013.In 2009 the University of Cape Town engineering graduate visited Baikonur, the famous Russian cos-modrome from which Yuri Gagarin journeyed into space. He helped launch SumbandilaSat from the same site. And he would be delighted to return in order to launch SumbandilaSat2.

Khalid Manjoo, from the South African satellite company SunSpace.

An association to encourage the involvement of African women in aerospace lifted off in Cape Town yesterday,

with members from Algeria, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and South Africa.Women in Aerospace Africa links female professionals scat-tered across different areas of the space industry, such as space law, policy and engineering, said Carla Sharpe, the in-augural president.Sharpe, co-founder of South African Foundation for Space Development, told members at a breakfast meeting the aim of the new organisation was to “help women to develop their careers in aerospace.”The association also hopes to “use women already in aero-space to inspire young women to pursue careers in the field”.“If I can take a female astronaut to schools, the children will be inspired to see new possibilities of what they can achieve,” she said.Nomfuneko Majaja, a Pretoria-based chief director at South

Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry, welcomed the launch of the association.Eastern Cape-born Majaja, who serves in a senior position on the United Nations’ Office for Outer Space Affairs, said the lobby group will help African women in aerospace shape their own destinies.Many of the African women in aerospace are among 2,600 delegates attending the International Astronautical Con-gress, taking place for the first time on African soil.Dr Catherine Coleman, the NASA astronaut, will speak at Cape Town’s Rustenburg Girls Junior School, in Rondebosch, at 2:15 pm today.Coleman left the International Space Station in May 2011 af-ter an extended mission, logging 159 days in space. She has been on two American space shuttle missions, but travelled most recently on Russia’s Soyuz rocket. She has also met Valentina Tereshkova, the Russian cosmonaut who became the first woman in space in 1963.

AfricAn women move into AeroSpAce

India hopes to launch its first robotic mission to land on the Moon in two

years’ time. Sridhar Raja from the Indian Space Re-search Organisation announced yesterday that the new mis-sion will carry a lander and a rover to explore the lunar surface. The mission is called Chandrayaan-2, which literally means the sec-ond moon ve-hicle in the San-skrit language, and will be a collaboration with Russia.Scientists will

use the rover’s sensors to assess the presence of water, oxygen and salt – all necessary prerequisites if humans are to eventually build longer-term bases on the Moon.

Instruments would also try to find the most stable temperatures on

the Moon, Raja said.The 2013 lander would be launched from southern India,

at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on an island

north of Chennai. India hopes to send

humans into space from the same

launchpad in 2015.But India’s main focus

is not to live on the Moon, but to help use the Moon to make Earth more liv-able, the engineer said.“The ultimate goal is to see how we can utilise the resources on the Moon to help humans,’’ Raja explained.‘‘Right now there is a lack of electric-ity. The Moon has helium three, which is used in nuclear reactors to produce power. We can bring that back to the earth and produce power,” India sent an orbiter around the Moon, which is continuing to send back valu-able information. The orbiter will be used to bounce information from the lander back to Earth. The first orbiter shot a probe into the south pole of the Moon in late 2008, making India the fourth country to place its flag on the Moon.

indiA to lAnd on the moon in 2013

Tanja Masson-Zwaan of the International Institute of Space Law, Netherlands, with Carla Sharpe, the founding head of Women in Aerospace Africa, and Angeline Asangire Oprong of the International Institute of Space Law, Germany and Lulu Makapela, deputy director (aviation and aerospace) at South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry.

Ranganath Navalgund of India’s Space Applications Centre is very pleased with India’s progress with their next lunar mission, scheduled for 2013.

hAmmock of SAtelliteS crAdleS All biodiverSity

Remote sensing is critical to combating biodiversity loss, according to Bob Scholes from Africa’s biggest

research body, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa.“There are very important measures that remote sensing can bring to the table which are essential for the task of monitoring biodiversity loss,” Scholes said yesterday.Scholes, the chair of the international Group on Earth Ob-servation Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), said satellites could keep an eye on entire ecosystems.“We know of in excess of one and a half million species on Earth, but we estimate that there are ten to a hundred times this amount,” the systems ecologist said.“There is no way we could look after each one of those even if we knew what they are so we really have to con-serve things at ecosystem level.”In such a context, “remote sensing not only becomes very useful for biodiversity, it actually becomes essential,” Scholes told the IAC’s first earth observation symposium.‘‘If you look after the ecosystem, the organisms will look after itself,’’ he told anyone concerned with individual species or even particular animals, plants or insects.Satellites have provided strong evidence that the “rate

of loss of biodiversity is accelerating,” said Scholes, who helped to develop the Global Earth Observing System of Systems.“The rate of extinction is about 1000 times faster than the replacement rate,” warned Scholes, who also participated in the design of the South African Multispectral Micros-atellite Imager.“In biodiversity, which is one of the great challenges to humankind in the 21st century, we cannot solve this problem without really solid support from the space pro-gramme operations,” he concluded.Scholes serves on the board of the new South African Na-tional Space Agency (SANSA).The co-chairs of the IAC’s earth observation symposium series are US consultant John Hussey and Pierre Ranzoli from Eumetsat in Germany.Tuesday morning’s focus was on future earth observa-tion systems while Tuesday afternoon’s session looked at earth observation satellites’ sensors and technology.Wednesday morning’s session in this track is scheduled to include a talk on the geospatial analysis of wetlands by Yusuf Momohjimoh of Nigeria’s National Space Research and Development Agency.

Päivi Jukola from Aalto Univer-sity in Finland has proposed a

space think tank, to be run by the International Astronautical Fed-eration (IAF).Such a think tank should incor-porate public views in order to help the general understanding of space science, and ultimately increase funding into the sector, she suggested.“We have to reach out and wake people’s interest,” Jukola told del-egates at yesterday’s session on human exploration in deep space.She said space sciences can’t continue being a preserve of sci-entists if it is to attract increased investment.“We need to invite everybody in-cluding taxpayers to contribute their opinions and not just to

leave it to experts,’’ she suggested.‘‘When people know more, they can be interested in investing. And we need the money today,” said Jukola, who sits on the IAF general assembly as a representa-tive of the Finnish Astronautical Society. Jukola’s talk generated a lot of discussion among delegates who want to see the public being more involved in space sciences.The delegates also proposed that a public day be held annually at the International Astronautical Congress to stir interest among young people in space sciences. In addition to being a speaker, Jukola chaired the session along with Alain Dupas of the European Bank for Reconstruction and De-velopment.

think tAnk for SpAce ScienceS propoSed

History buffs: John Mankins of Artemis Innovation Management Solutions in the USA be speaking tomorrow on space technology at NASA from 1986 to 1993 in a session on space history at 10 am in meeting room TS 12. Other topics: the birth of the French space policy, Spacelab and Japanese space policy. The session is chaired by Marsha Freeman of the USA.

William Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), introduced last night’s lecture on The Amazing Flying Machine: The Space Shuttle’s Technical Advancements and Contributions to the Next Generation. The speaker was John Shannon, manager of NASA’s space shuttle programme.

Newsletter copy by Research Africa Design and production by Hippo Communications

‘’Tools, instruments and astronauts are useless if they are lost in space’’ is the philosophy of Claude Nicollier, the Swiss astronaut who served on four space shuttle missions, including two to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Nicollier had three pieces of advice for would-be spacewalkers: don’t be claustrophobic; stabilise your body, or nothing will work; and don’t let anything go. He displayed some beautiful pictures during his presentation, including a shot of Cape Town from 600 kilometres overhead.

Small earth observation missions will be a focus today, including talks by Phillip Whittaker and Alex da Silva Curiel from small satellite manufacturer Surrey, who this week announced completion of the development phase of its new low-cost synthetic aperture radar satellite system, which sees through cloud cover across both day and night. Astrium is responsible for developing the payload. The platform hosting the payload is an adaptation of the very-high-resolution imaging NigeriaSat-2 mission launched in August. Luis Gomes of Surrey Satellite Technology says that the technology has improved to the point where they can offer ‘’space-based radar capability’’ for the ‘’traditional low cost optical Earth observation mission.’’ Radar images reveal surface textures instead of reflected light. A radar satellite illuminates its target with a microwave beam, then records the signal bouncing back. The talk on small earth observation missions will take place at 10 am in meeting roomt TS 10.