News & Events

New AIUB – EUMETSAT – Collaboration

1. February 2021:
The Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern (AIUB) concluded a contract with the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) to launch the
Bernese POD Scientific Service that shall be provided to the Remote Sensing and Products (RSP) Division within EUMETSAT’s Technical and Scientific Support (TSS) Department. EUMETSAT intends to apply the Bernese GNSS Software (BSW) as a baseline software for its scientific and operational activities related to precise orbit determination (POD) involving several missions such as EPS/Metop, Sentinel-3, EPS-SG, Sentinel-6/Jason-CS and other missions of opportunity. For this purpose, EUMETSAT has initiated a Scientific Service contributing to the maintenance and evolution of the BSW as required for EUMETSAT’s POD applications.

Operational combination of monthly GRACE-FO gravity field models

21. december 2020:
Since July 2019, the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern (AIUB) operates the Combination Service for Time-Variable Gravity Fields (COST-G) of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG). COST-G first performs a quality control, analysing the signal content of the gravity fields provided by the GRACE-FO Analysis Centres (ACs), and then generates a combination. In November 2020, two years after the launch of the GRACE-FO satellites in May 2018, the combination at COST-G became operational, aiming at the combination of the monthly gravity fields derived from GRACE-Follow On (GRACE-FO) with short latency.

ILRS Virtual World Tour 2020

24. november 2020:
In place of an International Laser Ranging Station (ILRS) Workshop this November, the ILRS wanted to take the opportunity to try something different and look in detail at a selection of stations in the global network. This 'Virtual World Tour' took place online on November 2-6, 2020, virtually visiting 5 ILRS stations in 5 days, stopping among others also at Zimmerwald Observatory operated by the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Scale of Global Reference Frames from Galileo Data

3. November 2020:
The Center of Orbit Determination in Europe (CODE) of the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern (AIUB) successfully demonstrated for the first time that the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) could make an important and independent contribution to the determination of the scale when realizing new reference frames for the Earth thanks to the disclosure of the Galileo satellite antenna calibrations.

Callisto Geodesy

14. October 2020:
The subgroup "Orbit and Gravity Field Determination" of AIUB’s satellite geodesy group has recently initiated a new project, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation, where the exploration of Callisto with an orbiting spacecraft is studied.

First Daylight Laser Measurements of a Space Debris Object

10. August 2020:
On June 24 2020, AIUB acquired the first ever daylight observations of a space debris object using a geodetic laser at the Swiss Optical Ground station and Geodynamics Observatory Zimmerwald. Such measurements may be essential to reduce the orbit uncertainty of space debris objects, hereby allowing spacecraft operators to identify close conjunctions and to devise and execute efficient avoidance maneuvers.

Breakup of an Atlas 5 upper stage observed

1. April 2019:

On March 26 we were informed by our Russian colleagues (Vladimir Agapov) that they discovered a breakup of the Atlas 5 upper stage 2009-047B (SSN 35816; apogee - 34708.9km, perigee – 6675.6km) on March 25, 2019, at 22:23 UTC. The following night we were successfully observing fragments from this event with 3 sensors at the Swiss Optical Ground Station and Geodynamics Observatory Zimmerwald. The attached animated gif shows a series of observations from the 0.8m ZimMAIN telescope.