Satellite News

The third and final orbit-raising manoeuvre of GSAT-14 was successfully executed with a 172-second firing from Isro’s Master Control Facility at Hasan in Karnataka.

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. announced that operational control of the Space Test Program Satellite-3 (STPSat-3) has been handed over to the U.S. Air Force as the spacecraft begins its technology demonstration mission.

Rocket: Antares; Payload: Cygnus/Orb-1; Date: 9 January 2014, 1807 UTC; Launch site: Wallops Flight Facility, USA. Following a 10-minute ascent, the Cygnus spacecraft was successfully deployed by the Antares upper stage and placed into its intended orbit of about 220 x 280 km above the Earth, inclined at 51.6 degrees to the equator.

The flight software and avionics for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) were integrated and powered for testing today at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as part of a milestone known as first light.

Lockheed Martin will continue tracking and sharing data on orbiting space assets and debris through a US$3.9 million contract from the U.S. Air Force Life Cycle Management Center. Under this contract, Lockheed Martin will continue to develop the Non-Traditional Data Pre-Processor (NDPP) under the Integrated Space Command and Control (ISC2) contract.

Orbital’s Antares launch team has decided to scrub today’s launch attempt due to an unusually high level of space radiation that exceeded by a considerable margin the constraints imposed on the mission to ensure the rocket’s electronic systems are not impacted by a harsh radiation environment.

ESA’s billion-star surveyor Gaia is now in its operational orbit around a gravitationally stable virtual point in space called ‘L2′, 1.5 million km from Earth.

Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) announced the global expansion of the Dream Chaser Space System through recently finalised co-operative understandings with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).