Video Kidibot

Tag: offers

  • Dropship offers safe landings for Mars rovers

    Dropship offers safe landings for Mars rovers

    The dramatic conclusion to ESA’s latest StarTiger project: a ‘dropship’ quadcopter steers itself to lower a rover gently onto a safe patch of the rocky martian surface. StarTiger’s Dropter project was tasked with developing and demonstrating a European precision-landing capability for Mars and other targets.

    Starting from scratch for the eight-month project, the Dropter team was challenged to produce vision-based navigation and hazard detection and avoidance for the dropship. It has to identify a safe landing site and height before winching down its passenger rover on a set of cables. Flight testing took place at Airbus Defence and Space’s Trauen test site in northern Germany.

    Read more: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Dropship_offers_safe_landings_for_Mars_rovers

    Credit:
    Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, DFKI
    Spin.Works
    Poznañ University of Technology/Institute of Control and Information Engineering, IAII
    Airbus Defence & Space

  • ESA Euronews: Copernicus offers a flood of disaster data

    ESA Euronews: Copernicus offers a flood of disaster data

    The recent floods in the UK saw a lot of the management of that disaster made possible by using information from satellites. But how? In this edition of Space we find out.

    Flooding affects thousands of people every year across Europe, and this year one of them just happened to be a flood scientist – Spanish Research Fellow at Reading University in England, Javier García-Pintado.

    His back garden looks onto the Thames, he explains: “This is the bank of the Thames, and this areas was severely affected by the recent flooding. Specifically in this little bit of land we are a tiny bit higher, and we didn’t have any problems, but our neighbours around here certainly did.”

    García-Pintado knew his young family was safe at home, because he could count on his expert knowledge; his day job is using satellite data to improve flood models.

    “As hydrologists we were pretty confident that this property wouldn’t have a problem, and we told our neighbours,” he told euronews.

    Not everyone has a neighbour as knowledgeable as Javier, nor were they as lucky.

    The whole area west of London was affected as England and Wales lived through their wettest winter in almost 250 years.