Satellite News

a.i. solutions announced it has developed “Meridian,” a flight dynamics software application for defence, civil and commercial satellite ground systems. Built on the FreeFlyer astrodynamics software, Meridian addresses common geosynchronous and low Earth orbit (GEO/LEO) spacecraft flight dynamics requirements and streamlines operations, the company said.

The world-wide Ground Mission Segment providing all Galileo navigation messages has completed a full-scale hardware and software migration to version V2.0, and is now fully operational again.

COM DEV International Ltd. announced that it has received a C$2.6 million contract extension on activities associated with the James Webb Space Telescope programme.

Australian satellite firm NewSat said that French export bank COFACE had withdrawn support for the project, forcing it to look for alternative funding to prevent the project from collapsing.

Pre-launch processing of a Proton-M with Briz-M upper stage and the Mexican MexSat-1 communications satellite continues at Baikonur cosmodrome.

Orbital ATK, Inc. has signed a US$90 million contract with Lockheed Martin to provide the Attitude Control Motor (ACM) for Orion’s Launch Abort System (LAS).

Blue Origin recently completed acceptance testing of its BE-3 rocket engine, the first new hydrogen engine to be developed in the United States in more than a decade. It has been fired for more than 30,000 seconds over the course of 450 tests.

Since its capture by the gravity of dwarf planet Ceres on 6 March NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has performed flawlessly, continuing to thrust with its ion engine as planned. The thrust, combined with Ceres’ gravity, is gradually guiding the spacecraft into a circular orbit around the dwarf planet. All of the spacecraft’s systems and instruments are in excellent health.