Satellite News

The Swedish Space Corporation has announced its signing of an agreement with the University of Chile in Santiago regarding the purchase of Centro de Estudios Espaciales (CEE).

Astrium Services has opened its new teleport in Toulouse, adding a satellite infrastructure network in France to the existing networks the company already has in the United Kingdom and Germany.

The U.S. military may have to delay its shootdown of the failed NRO-L21 (USA 193) spy satellite planned for 21 February (UTC) because of bad weather, a senior military official said.

SpaceDev, Inc. has been awarded contracts to deliver satellite battery bypass switches for Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) in support of the 1300-series spacecraft platform.

The Ice, Cloud and Land Satellite (ICESat) built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. will continue operations until at least 2010 following a NASA mission extension contract.

The Americom-14 (AMC-14) satellite of SES Americom was delivered to Baikonur, Kazakhstan, to be readied for its Proton M/Briz M launch scheduled for the morning of 15 March local time (the exact time has not yet been announced).

NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis, which successfully delivered ESA’s Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station, has safely returned to Earth with its crew of seven. Landing took place at 1407 UTC on 20 February on the shuttle landing strip of Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA.