Scientific American - USA (2012-12)

December 2021, ScientificAmerican.com 19

©^ ESA

S. Corvaja

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

On the Fly

A reprogrammable satellite

creates new possibilities

Companies, governments and other cus-

tomers will soon be able to directly access

instruments on a satellite and assign them

new missions on the fly. According to pro-

gram manager Frédéric Piro, the Eutelsat

Quantum, which blasted into space from

Kourou in French Guiana this summer, is

the world’s first commercial satellite that

can be fully reprogrammed in orbit.

Adjustable antennas, reconfigurable trans-

mission beams and customized electronics

let the satellite run a wide range of applica-

tions—and switch between them in min-

utes—at 36,000 kilometers above Earth.

Governments can use the satellite for

such tasks as disaster safety operations and

border monitoring, and private operators

might facilitate telecommunications for air

and sea, the company says. Ac cording to

Therese Jones, senior director of policy

at Washington, D.C.–based Satellite Industry

Association, Eutelsat Quantum “ex cels in

mobility applications by reallocating com-

munication channels to, for example, air-

planes, ships or vehicles on the ground,

based on demand in real time.” Its eight

radio-frequency beams can help it maintain

communications with moving sources,

“which is much harder to manage for tradi-

tional satellites with one wide beam,” says

Jones, who is not involved with the project.

The satellite can also detect and deal with

rogue transmissions that might interfere

with signals, automatically changing beams’

frequencies or power to prevent disruption.

This is important because jamming a satel-

lite’s signals by blasting “noise” on the same

frequency it uses has become very easy,

Jones says. “All one needs is a jammer, some

of which are available for less than $100.

Whereas earlier it used to be purely state

actors that were jamming satellite signals,

there are now even small organizations that

do it,” she adds. “Sometimes it’s intentional,

while in other cases it’s the unintended inter-

ference from some other radio device.”

Piro says strong encryption will protect

the satellite software itself against hacking.

Jones notes that satellites in general tend to

be very secure because they also handle mil-

itary services; most problems arise from user

errors, such as bad choice of passwords.

To design a mission, customers can use

a dedicated software application to choose

an assignment’s coverage area and capacity.

“The software will then compute these

parameters and direct them to the space-

craft,” Piro says. “All this will be done auton-

omously without the operator’s involve-

ment. Moreover, customers can predesign

more than one application and switch

between the two at the press of a button.”

The satellite was developed in a private-

public partnership with the European Space

Agency and other organizations. “With

Eutelsat Quantum,” Piro says, “we have

managed to make the technology affordable

and accessible for commercial use.”

— Dhananjay Khadilkar

BIOCHEMISTRY

Radioactive

Recycling

A ubiquitous bacterium might

help manage nuclear waste

Fission in nuclear reactors forges radio-

active metal by-products so toxic that they

must be stored deep underground, at great

cost and effort, for millennia. But a protein

made by a common microbe could help ease

this hazardous burden, researchers re port in

the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Two of nuclear waste’s most problemat-

ic ingredients are metals called americium

and curium; each has particularly long-

lived forms that decay much more slowly

than uranium. They need to be monitored

for thousands of years—and because they

radiate so much heat, waste packages con-

taining them must be buried far apart. Iso-

lating them properly is critical to avoid ra-

diation harm to people or the environment,

according to Pennsylvania State biochemist

Joseph Cotruvo, Jr. “It’s a really big problem

if these elements are around even in very

small quantities,” he says.

In 2018 Cotruvo and a team of research-

ers first reported that Methylorubrum

ex torquens (an innocuous bacterium

commonly found in soil and

on plants) produces a pro-

tein called lanmodulin.

The microbe uses this

protein to grab naturally

occurring metals, typi-

cally from a group

called the lanthanides,

to drive its metabolism.

More recently, Cotruvo

and his colleagues found in

the lab that lanmodulin binds

tightly and readily to americium and curi-

um—and prefers them to many of its regular

dance partners. Plus, the bond was thou-

sands of times stabler than that of the next-

strongest naturally occurring molecular suit-

or. They are not sure if lanmodulin produced

by the ubiquitous M. extorquens naturally

captures or disperses americium and curi-

um ions already in the environment, such as

those released by nuclear weapons tests and

waste leaks—a possible future study focus.

The researchers propose integrating the

protein into radiation detectors and filters

to extract these long-lived radioac-

tive metals from contained nu-

clear waste. They could then

be sequestered separately,

decreasing the volume

of material that needs

extended monitoring

and spacing. Alterna-

tively, Cotruvo suggests,

captured americium and

curium could be recycled

back into nuclear fuel.

It is serendipitous that a bac-

terium-created molecule might help

build tools to scavenge hazardous human-

made contaminants, says Gemma Reguera,

a microbiologist at Michigan State Univer-

sity who was not involved in the study.

“It’s like a toy,” she says. “There are so

many possibilities.” — Nikk Ogasa

Illustration by Thomas Fuchs