Satellite News

Rocket: Antares; Payload: mass simulator, four piggyback satellites; Date: 21 April 2013, 1000 UTC, Launch site: Wallops Island, USA. After another scrub on 20 April owing to upper-level winds, today’s launch went as scheduled without any hitch.

Rocket: Soyuz 2-1A; Payload: Bion-M1, several microsatellites (BeeSat-2, BeeSat-3, SOMP, OSSI-1, AIST); Date: 19. April 2013, 1000 UTC; Launch site: Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The project is to study the reactions of living organisms exposed to microgravity and artificial gravity.

Orbital Sciences Corporation announced that the next launch attempt for the new Antares rocket will be no earlier than Saturday, 20 April at 21 UTC owing to bad weather on Friday.

SES announced that, together with its partners Harmonic and Broadcom Corporation, it has pioneered the first Ultra HD transmission in the new HEVC standard live from an Astra satellite at 19.2 degrees East.

The launch of Orbital’s new Antares rocket from Wallops Island was scrubbed today after an umbilical seperated prematurely from the launcher’s second stage 12 minutes before the scheduled lift-off.

Scientists will soon gain a better view into energy and plasma movement near the surface of the Sun, thanks to delivery of the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spacecraft to Vandenberg Air Force Base in preparation for launch.

NASA has awarded the University of California, Berkeley, up to US$200 million to build a satellite to determine how Earth’s weather affects weather at the edge of space, in hopes of improving forecasts of extreme “space weather” that can disrupt global positioning satellites (GPS) and radio communications.

Northrop Grumman Corporation will provide 48 more self-deploying, monopole JIB antennas for Global Positioning System (GPS III) satellites under a follow-on contract from Lockheed Martin Corporation. The work will be carried out by Astro Aerospace, a strategic business unit of Northrop Grumman.