TopSat is dead. RIP.

Wednesday, 19 August, 2009

I blogged a while back about the availability of TopSat for academic research and whilst the data I received was not great it did provide very good data for many users. I had noticed that they had ceased tasking the satellite formally, but managed to get two late requests in. The first was completed but the data was not good. Whilst waiting for these to be re-collected I received the following news on 18th August:

Unfortunately QinetiQ have come to the decision to end TopSat operations by the end of the week. We would have continued to schedule up until tomorrow had it not been for an unexpected hardware failure here in the office.

The “end TopSat operations” seems pretty final. Let’s hope that the TopSat experiment will be followed up with something equally interesting.