Satellite News

Preparations for the launch of the second Global Xpress satellite, Inmarsat-5 F2 (I-5 F2), are now at an advanced stage at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

MESSENGER mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) successfully conducted a manoeuvre designed to raise the spacecraft’s minimum altitude sufficiently to extend orbital operations and delay the probe’s inevitable impact onto Mercury’s surface until early next spring.

The Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite-Nadir (OMPS-N) instrument has been successfully integrated with the JPSS-1 spacecraft, NOAA announced. OMPS is the second JPSS-1 instrument to be integrated after the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) was installed last month.

On 24 January 2015, Meteosat-7 becomes the longest-serving operational satellite in EUMETSAT history, clocking up 17 years of monitoring the weather from space.