Satellite News

Space shuttle Discovery, with its seven-member crew, launched at 0359 UTC on 29 August 2009 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle will deliver supplies, equipment and a new crew member to the International Space Station.

Radio contact with India’s Chandrayaan-1 moon probe was abruptly lost at 2000 UTC on 28 August 2009. “Detailed review of the Telemetry data received from the spacecraft is in progress and health of the spacecraft subsystems is being analysed,” ISRO said in a terse statement.

Engineers for NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) project have stepped up the communication rate being received from the orbiter as an early step in the process of determining why the spacecraft spontaneously rebooted its computer on 26 August, 1242 UTC.