Satellite News

Preparations for Arianespace’s sixth Ariane 5 mission in 2014 are gearing up with two separate milestones marked this week in French Guiana: arrival of one of the flight’s two satellite passengers – DirecTV-14 – and the assembly start-up for its heavy-lift launcher.

The next Soyuz rocket lifting off from French Guiana will reportedly carry four O3b satellites and not, as previously planned, two Galileo spacecraft.

Preparations for the third landing of the X-37B, the U.S. Air Force’s unmanned, reusable space plane, are underway at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), developed and built by Airbus Defence and Space and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), built by a European consortium led by the company, have successfully passed a 120 day cryogenic vacuum test campaign within the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The recently launched Boeing Global Positioning System (GPS) IIF satellite has completed on-orbit checkout.