Satellite News

United Launch Alliance (ULA) recently received its 2013 delivery of Atlas V RD-180 engines from RD AMROSS. The four engines arrived on an Antonov aircraft at Huntsville International Airport in Alabama where they were transported to ULA’s facility in Decatur, Alabama.

Astrium has been awarded a contract by U.S. company DirecTV Latin America to build the latest addition to its communications satellite fleet. The satellite will be based on Astrium’s Eurostar E3000 platform and will be placed in orbit at the start of 2016.

Astrium has delivered the proto-flight model (PFM) of the microwave radiometer (MWR) – an instrument for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel-3A environmental monitoring satellite – to the prime contractor Thales Alenia Space for installation on the Sentinel-3A satellite.

Orbital Sciences Corporation confirmed that its Cygnus cargo logistics spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean east of New Zealand at approximately 1815 UTC on 23 October.

COM DEV International Ltd. announced that one of its customers has exercised options for additional equipment valued at over C$15 million on a previously announced contract.

NASA’s Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) has used a pulsed laser beam to transmit data over the 382,00 km between the moon and Earth at a record-breaking download rate of 622 megabits per second (Mbps).

The Avionics 4000 equipping Thales Alenia Space’s entire Spacebus family of platforms, which was qualified in flight with the launch of the AMC-12 satellite on 3 February 2005, has now celebrated 100 years of cumulated service in orbit.