Wednesday, December 15, 2010

European Space Station in Malindi

 Malindi station at ASI's L. Broglio Space Centre, Malindi, Kenya

Did you know that Malindi is host to the European Space Agency? The ESA space station and situational awareness.

 
 Malindi station terminal (MAL-1, 10m) provides tracking capabilities in S-band (transmit & receive) and L- and X-band (receive); the station is operated by ASI, the Italian Space Agency, in cooperation with the University of Rome, Centro di Ricerca Progetto San Marco (CRPSM), and is used by ESA for LEOP (launch and early operation phase) as well as back-up coverage.  

Location || 2.996°S, 40.196°E

The station lies within ASI's L. Broglio Space Centre, located at 2.995556° South and 40.194511° East. The 10-m antenna terminal elevation is -12.75 metres. The L. Broglio Space Centre is situated in Ungwana Bay, Ngomeni, near Malindi, Kenya. The site is on the coast about 115 km north of Mombasa.
 

Facilities & technology

The station hosts a 10-m antenna that transmits and receives signals in S-band, and receives in L- and X-band, plus facilities for tacking, telemetry, telecommand and radiometric measurements (ranging, Doppler), and communications are enabled via the ESA Operations Network (OPSNET).
 


ESTRACK Malindi
10m antenna, Malindi station

The site is equipped with a no-break power plant.
Operations
The site is operated by the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The exploitation of the site is carried out by ASI and the Centro Ricerca Aerospaziali (CRA), Centro di Ricerca Progetto San Marco (CRPSM), of the University of Rome. ESA's usage of the Malindi-1 (MAL-1) terminal and the hosting of the GPS-TDAF system is through CRPSM, while the hosting of the GESS system is through ASI.
The facility was established in 1964 and managed by the University of Rome until 2004, when management was transferred to ASI. In 1995, an inter-governmental agreement renewed the bilateral space co-operation between Italy and Kenya. In 1996, Italy, Kenya and ESA signed a tri-lateral agreement to cooperate for the use and development of the Centre. Activities during the past 40 years span from rocket launches to satellite TT&C support and remote sensing image acquisition.
Malindi has provided lEOP support for recent ESA launches including Rosetta and MetOp. The station supports Ariane launches, as well as missions operated by the Chinese space Agency (Shenzou), the ASI-NASA Swift mission (since November 2003) and ASI's AGILE mission (starting in April 2007).
 

GPS-TDAF/GESS

A GPS-TDAF (GPS Tracking and Data Analysis Facility) dual-frequency receiver system with geodetic accuracy is installed on the site, which delivers continuous measurements to the ESOC Navigation Facility.
Since November 2006, the station has also hosted a Galileo Experimental Sensor Station (GESS) receiver with geodetic accuracy, which delivers continuous measurements to the ESOC Navigation Facility.
 

Access & contact

The ESOC point of contact is:
Head of Ground Facilities Operations Div. (OPS-ON)
ESOC, Darmstadt
Tel: +49-6151-90-0
Local site contact:
Luigi Broglio Space Centre Telemetry Station
CRPSM Station Manager
Mr Marco Cecchini
Mr Emilio Fioravanti
ttcmal [@] psm.uniroma1.it
Tel: +254-42-30959
Mailing address:
Luigi Broglio Space Centre Telemetry Station
P.O. Box 203
Malindi
Kenya

MMC SHAME!

Malindi Municipal Council suffered their worst defeat at the Kenya Inter Municipalities Sports and Cultural Association (Kimsca) Games' football competition when they were hammered 10-1 by defending champions Nairobi City Council at the Afraha stadium.
The city lads led by player coach and former AFC Leopards player George Sunguti played like a well oiled machine and their defence was rarely tested by the blunt Malindi striking force which was non-existent in the 90 minutes.
After only two minutes, Nairobi opened the floodgates when speedy striker William Oloo tapped an easy goal and two minutes later, Vincent Otieno who had a brilliant afternoon was on the mark when he converted the second goal.
Malindi scored their consolation goal a minute before the full time when Khalfani Nassib Simba outwitted two Nairobi defenders and laid a square pass to Patrick Chipira who in turn made no mistake from inside the box.
Malindi coach Sudi Suleiman conceded defeat but blamed the referee for not standing firm in some of his decisions.

RECOVERING CHINA'S PAST ON KENYA'S COAST

A team of Chinese archeologists arrived in Kenya last week, headed for waters surrounding the Lamu archipelago on the country's northern coast. They hadn't made the trip to study local history. They came to recover a lost Chinese past.
In the early 1400s, nearly a century before Vasco da Gama reached eastern Africa, Chinese records say that the great admiral Zheng He took his vast fleet of treasure ships as far as Kenya's northern Swahili coast. Zheng visited the Sultan of Malindi, the most powerful local ruler, and brought back exotic gifts, including a giraffe. "Africa was China's El Dorado—the land of rare and precious things, mysterious and unfathomable," writes Louise Levathes in her 1994 history of Zheng's voyages, "When China Ruled the Seas."
Now the Chinese government is funding a three-year, $3 million project, in cooperation with the National Museums of Kenya, to find and analyze evidence of Zheng's visits. The underwater search for shipwrecks follows a dig last summer in the village of Mambrui that unearthed a rare coin carried only by emissaries of the Chinese emperor, as well as a large fragment of a green-glazed porcelain bowl whose fine workmanship befits an imperial envoy. Although Ming-era porcelains are nothing new in Mambrui—Chinese porcelains fill the local museum and decorate a centuries-old tomb—the latest finds suggest that the wares came not through Arab merchants but directly from China.
For a resurgent China with often-controversial business ventures in Africa, Zheng's voyages epitomize what the 20th-century literary critic Van Wyck Brooks called a "usable past"—a historical tradition that serves present needs. Falling somewhere between history and myth, a usable past selects and emphasizes what is relevant and resonant for the present and omits the contradictory or distracting. It both shapes and communicates identity, whether national, ethnic, artistic, religious, institutional or personal.
What you believe, or want to believe, about your past says a lot about who you are in the present. Americans celebrate the settlers at Plymouth Plantation as immigrants seeking religious freedom, thus allowing more-recent arrivals of very different faiths to identify with their story. The Pilgrims "journeyed many a day and night / To worship God as they thought right," declares a children's Thanksgiving poem, glossing over the particulars of their separatist beliefs and their disenchantment with the tolerant Dutch society from which they had fled. Nuanced history isn't the point. A usable past may be anachronistic or imprecise, but it always contains an inspiring element of truth.
As a usable past, Zheng He's story says three important things about China: It was powerful and technologically advanced, more so than European nations. It was outward-looking and adventurous. And it came to trade, not to conquer or exploit. As the long-insular country becomes a global power, this narrative maintains China's connection to its history while reassuring other countries of its benign intentions and, of course, presenting China as materially and morally superior to Europe—a bearer of "peace and friendship" rather than a colonial power.
"We're discovering that the Chinese had a very different approach from the Europeans to East Africa," Herman Kiriama, the lead archaeologist from the National Museums of Kenya, told the BBC. "Because they came with gifts from the emperor, it shows they saw us as equals."
Well, maybe. Fifteenth-century exchanges of tribute were rather different from modern trade or diplomacy, as were the political notions of hierarchy and obligation in which they were embedded. Nor was Ming China a bastion of pacifist persuasion. Zheng's fleets were well-armed, and Zheng himself was a war captive who was brutally castrated when he was only a child. For all the spin, however, it's encouraging that China wants to see itself as a dynamic commercial power engaged in peaceful trade.
The real problem with contemporary China's version of the Zheng He story is that it omits the ending. In the century after Zheng's death in 1433, emperors cut back on shipbuilding and exploration. When private merchants replaced the old tribute trade, the central authorities banned those ships as well. Building a ship with more than two masts became a crime punishable by death. Going to sea in a multimasted ship, even to trade, was also forbidden. Zheng's logs were hidden or destroyed, lest they encourage future expeditions. To the Confucians who controlled the court, writes Ms. Levathes, "a desire for contact with the outside world meant that China itself needed something from abroad and was therefore not strong and self-sufficient."
Today's globalized China has apparently abandoned that insular ideology. But it still clings to the centralized autocracy that could produce Zheng's voyages in one generation only to destroy the technology and ambition they embodied in the next. It still officially celebrates "harmony" against the unruliness and competition that create sustained innovation. Its past would be more usable if it offered models of diversity and dissent or, at the very least, sanctuary from the all-or-nothing decisions of absolutist rule.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

The Italian Job

There has been a subtle hue and cry among the local business people and residents that lately the resident Italian in Malindi have taken over all aspects of the local industry. Though publicly uttered, it is nonetheless a subject of much heated debate among locals in clubs and hang joints. The story goes that the Italians came, saw and now are going about conquering business in town.
Malindi town's economy is basically tourism-based and it is in this sector that the Italians have launched a spearhead campaign to own and manage. Lately, it seems that they are the owners, proprietors, managers and clients of hotels, travel and tour agencies, entertainment spots, attraction sites and other tourism establishments. Proponents of this theory point to the fact that almost all the major hotels are Italian-owned and even their clients are almost exclusively from that quaint European country.
The local business owners are now accusing these establishments of locking them out of revenues channels previously their lifeline. One such outspoken and bitter critic claims that even such localized trades as curios and performing arts like traditional dances and acrobats are now wholly operated and controlled by Italian businessmen, leaving people like them who have been in the business for years without any prospects.
Another school of thought goes that unlike in the past, when a boom in tourist arrivals meant a feast for all, in recent times the hoteliers have taken to hogging their clients for the duration of their holiday. Allegedly, they now offer all the services and provide merchandise that before the tourists used to come to town to seek for themselves. So now they have curio boutiques, in-house entertainment, in-house travel and safari operations, salons, cultural events, name it. This way, the tourist have no need to leave the hotels and venture into town where most of the local businesses wait for clients. And this is the crux of the matter.
It seems that now the tourists are positively discouraged to spend their holiday Euros outside of these hotels.

Welcome to Malindi Online

Welcome to malindionline.blogspot.com, a blog for, of and by the residents of the paradise town of malindi on Kenya's north coast. Keep visiting this page for the latest news, events, photos, videos and opinions about the town.