Satellite News

The spacecraft and science instrument integration for the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) – NASA’s next Small Explorer (SMEX) Mission – has been completed, and final testing is underway.

Lockheed Martin delivered the core structure for the first in a series of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s next-generation geostationary weather satellites to the company’s Mississippi Space and Technology Center on NASA’s Stennis Space Center where it will undergo propulsion system integration.

ATK announced it was awarded a contract from the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) Defense Weather Systems Directorate to execute a study of Network-Centric Small Satellites as an element of SMC’s Weather Satellite Follow-On Activities.

Raytheon Company’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Common Ground System (CGS) recently added the Japanese Space Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Global Change Observation Mission 1 satellite to its growing list of global environmental missions.

The instrument aboard CNES’ CoRoT (Convection, Rotation & planetary Transits) spacecraft stopped producing scientific data on 2 November. Efforts to revive the instrument have so far been unsuccessful, and scientists are reportedly losing optimism in the recovery of the instrument.