•Notícia

The aim of the ISU is to train students and professionals in the use of a wide range of skills in all space-related disciplines and to train them to work in multidisciplinary international teams in which cultural differences may be a factor.

The programmes are aimed at broadening the initial education of each participant in all important fields relating to space and to develop in them a spirit of initiative and independent judgment.

The ISU offers two types of programme: two master’s programmes (12 months) in space studies and management and a programme in space studies (9 weeks). The course includes teaching activities carried out in the Vèrtex building and activities open to the public that will take place in Cosmocaixa.

The UPC Signal Processing and Communications Research Group, headed by Gregori Vázquez, will present their design of a digital communications system for the ATV, the unmanned robot ship that links Earth to the ISS in a project for ESA.

This complex system will guarantee communications between the ATV and the control centre on Earth, the ISS and the tracking and data relay satellite system (TDRSS), the network of satellites responsible for guaranteeing communications at any point in orbit.

The ATV is an unmanned cargo vehicle that is piloted automatically and will make supply trips to the station every six months. It will provide the station with equipment, food supplies and fuel. The communications system designed at UPC will make it possible to control the trajectory of the ATV automatically from Earth. The system, which can calculate distances, will also allow the ISS to regularly monitor the approach of the ATV by means of video images. It will also be linked to the TDRSS.

The system has been designed using state-of-the-art technology and is very robust; it belongs to the first generation of spread-spectrum transponders (communication systems that can control satellites). This means that the communication system is protected from any interference.

Adriano Camps of the Remote Sensing Research Group at UPC will give a presentation on the participation of the group in the campaign measures to support the European Space Agency Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, which will start in 2009; the object of this mission is to analyse the salinity of the world’s oceans to determine the effects of climate change.

For this mission, UPC scientists have designed a new model of a detection radiometer for observing the Earth that is capable of measuring global climate variables such as soil humidity and ocean salinity and providing better models of climate change and predicting weather, natural disasters and other phenomena.

This is the first detection radiometer for Earth observation to operate at 1.4 GHz, a frequency that provides improved spatial resolution. The device will be incorporated into the mini-satellite scheduled for launch by the European Space Agency in 2009. The device incorporates new electronics, antennas and signal processing elements and is being built by the companies Mier Comunicacions and CASA, as part of ESA’s Earth observation programme.

This radiometer uses interferometry, i.e., humidity and salinity signals are captured by means of a system of sensors connected to a set of 73 dual-polarized antennas placed in a "Y" formation. Processing the satellite date will provide more accurate climate predictions.

The SMOS mission will provide oceanographers, geologists and biologists with a world salinity map, which would normally take an average of 100 years and which will be obtained in between 10 days and a month. The current research and measurement campaign is taking place until 4 July at the Mirador del Balcón on the north coast of Gran Canaria and is aimed at providing better information on brightness temperature variation with waves. In this campaign, researchers from UPC are working with a team of scientists from the University of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria.

The ISU programme also includes presentations on scientific research and advances in astrophysics. The first presentation, by lecturer Ignasi Ribas of the Catalan Space Studies Institute and the CSIC, will cover planets in our solar system and extrasolar planets and how the use of space satellites has provided a better understanding of them.

Lecturer Jordi José of the UPC Astrophysics Group will also give a talk on the Sun as a star, what stars are, how they are born and how they evolve. He will also discuss how the use of satellites has shown violent stellar phenomena (novae, supernovae, X-ray bursters, pulsars, etc.) that cannot be seen from Earth, and the final stages of stellar evolution.

Jordi Isern, director of the Catalan Space Studies Institute, of which UPC is a partner, will talk about the galaxy and the universe as a whole, dark matter and energy and what we have learned about the fate of the universe from satellites in space.

A robot competition will be organized at UPC’s Campus Nord on 22 July, at 5 p.m. ISU students will compete with their robots, designed, built and programmed to move around an “exploration field”, collecting stones and avoiding obstacles.

Also, on 28 August, from 9 a.m. to 12 noon, students on the summer course will show in the Vèrtex building (c/ Eusebi Güell, 5. Barcelona. UPC Campus Nord) the projects they have worked on as a team on the following topics: space tourism, on the design of a space port or launch area for ships destined for space tourism; volcanoes and space-related technology, on studies of volcanoes using satellites (e.g., GPS techniques), and the Google Lunar X-Prize, i.e., proposals for submissions to the international competition of the same name, which carries a purse of USD30 million to be awarded to the best project for sending a robot to the Moon to take pictures of the lunar surface.