Satellite News

The Independent Enquiry Commission formed after the Ariane 5 launcher’s trajectory deviation during its 25 January 2018 mission issued its conclusions on Thursday, 22 February.

SpaceX postponed an attempt to launch a Falcon 9 rocket and the Spanish Hispasat 30W-6 (aka Hispasat 1F) communications satellite to perform tests on the rocket’s nose cone.

A bad weather forecast has prompted Japanese space officials to delay the launch of an H-2A rocket with a high-resolution government-owned reconnaissance satellite by at least 48 hours until 27 February (UTC).

Avio and Europropulsion have signed in Paris a supply contract for the coming 4 years for the final Ariane 5 production lot.

Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, this week lowered the orbit of the nearly 12-year-old CloudSat satellite following the loss of one of its reaction wheels, which control its orientation in orbit. While CloudSat’s science mission will continue, it will no longer fly as part of the Afternoon Constellation, or A-Train — six Earth-monitoring satellites that fly in a coordinated orbit.

JAXA, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. and Sony Corporation made a co-operative research agreement with respect to conducting the on-orbit demonstrations of laser communications system. This research to be executed in the Kibo module on the International Space Station (ISS) aims at establishing a communications system of mass data between spacecraft and that which connects Earth and Space.