Information Technology

The ESA Concurrent Design Facility has completed fifty design studies and reviews since its opening as an experimental facility in 1999. Work is now under way to make the software developed for this facility available to European space industry and space organisations.

Many candidate space missions now take advantage of the concurrent engineering capabilities offered by the Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) at ESA-ESTEC to reduce the duration of their preliminary design study from the seve

When planning a summer wedding, it does not really help to hear that “the probability of showers is increasing”. A precision weather forecast will predict when the sun comes out or when the rain stops – or foretells if there is fog on the road or shipping lane.

Helsinki Testbed is a project designed to develop precision weather services. It consists of two parallel projects: a wide-ranging research project launched by the Finnish Meteorological Institute in 2005 that focuses on prov

Today, for many, computer networks are an indispensable infrastructure that interconnects people, places and organisations. But increasingly they are beginning to creak as their complexity grows. Biological systems through years of evolution can offer clues on how to cope, as a research project has demonstrated.

“Even a minor perturbation on a network can cause major problems,” says Dr Ozalp Babaoglu at the University of Bologna. “Simply adding a computer or installing an operating system

Ames Laboratory researchers detect secret files lurking within digital images

Keeping computer files private requires only the use of a simple encryption program. For criminals or terrorists wanting to conceal their activities, however, attaching an encrypted file to an e-mail message is sure to raise suspicion with law enforcement or government agents monitoring e-mail traffic.

But what if files could be hidden within the complex digital code of a photographic image? A

A collaboration between the University of Leicester Space Research Centre and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is about to reach a new stage as hardware built at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai is sent to Leicester for integration into an x-ray camera.

The camera will eventually be returned to India for installation into Astrosat, India’s first national astronomy satellite. The five instruments in Astrosat’s payload will observe exotic o

The current decade will probably be known as the dawn of pervasive computing, when PCs were dethroned by technology to embed computers in almost everything. The hardware already exists to add features such as artificial intelligence and wireless connectivity to clothing or cars. Thanks to researchers, software is catching up fast.

“Hardware development has reached a stage where it is possible to have a fully-fledged computer with processor, memory and operating system on a board the size