[Satellite TODAY 09-30-10] Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) is investing more than $15 million to upgrade its technical facilities in the United Kingdom, the company announced Sept. 29.
    The EADS Astrium subsidiary will take the facility in partnership with the University of Surrey’s Surrey Research Park. SSTL said the investment would allow the company to work on a broader range of satellites and the capacity to integrate and test more satellites in parallel.
    The 10 million pounds ($15.8 million) 40,000-square-foot facility will provide clean rooms, laboratories and testing facilities for state-of-the-art space engineering. It will house about 40 permanent staff and up to 100 additional project-specific staff from across the company during peak test and integration periods.
    Due for completion in April 2011, the facility will be operating at full capacity as soon as it is opened when its secure clean room facilities will be used for the testing and integration of 14 navigation payloads for the deployment phase of Europe’s future GNSS system.
    “Our new integration and test facility will play a crucial role in our company’s development. Not only will it enable us to integrate the European GNSS payloads for the European Space Agency, but it will make it possible for us to integrate and test satellites directly opposite our headquarters improving time to market with first rate intra-company communications,” SSTL CEO Matt Perkins said in a statement.
    In July, SSTL begin building a small satellite for the Republic of Kazakhstan that will provide medium resolution multi-spectral Earth observation capability to complement the high-resolution satellite that is being provided by EADS Astrium as part of the contract awarded to the company in October 2009. The Republic of Kazakhstan is using the latest Earth observation technologies from EADS Astrium and its subsidiary SSTL to create a national system which will support its government with resource monitoring, resource management, land-use mapping and environmental monitoring information for policy and decision making.
    SSTL also is manufacturing the NigeriaSat-2 and Nigeria-X satellites. NigeriaSat-2 will provide high-resolution maps of Nigeria every four months as well as monthly monitoring of Nigerian crops for food supply security. NigeriaSat-2 also features dual 105 Mbps downlinks, which also can be operated as a 210 Mbps data connection, for fast transfer of large images to either the SSTL or Nigerian ground station. The satellite can be controlled directly from Nigeria and also from SSTL’s ground station to provide rapid imaging, with a typical 3-day turnaround from satellite tasking to GIS-ready images. These satellites are scheduled for launch in late October.