Satellite News

Control of Kazakhstan’s first telecommunication satellite, KazSat 1, has been lost again – this time possibly forever.

Rocket: Molniya-M; Payload: Kosmos 2446; Date: 2 December 2008, 0500 UTC; Site: Plesetsk, Russia. The classified military spacecraft likely is an early warning satellite.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) announced the addition of two DragonLab missions to its manifest, as a result of demand from a successful workshop held at SpaceX headquarters on 6 November to introduce the new DragonLab product.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Melco) has received an order to build the ST-2 communications satellite for a joint venture between Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SingTel) and Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom Company Limited (Chunghwa).

NASA, in coordination with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has selected Lockheed Martin Space Systems Companyas contractor for the next series of GOES weather satellites, GOES-R.

Ambient Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) testing was successfully completed on the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Sensor (VIIRS) for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) by Northrop Grumman Corporation’s subcontractor, Raytheon Company.

After nearly a month of daily checks to determine whether Martian NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander would be able to communicate again, the agency has stopped using its Mars orbiters to hail the lander and listen for its beep.

NASA has signed a US$141 million modification to the current International Space Station contract with the Russian Federal Space Agency for crew transportation services planned through the spring of 2012.