Satellite News

China is planning to be the first country to land a lunar probe on the far side of the moon, a Chinese lunar probe scientist said.

NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) programme in April 2015 requested proposals for interplanetary CubeSat investigations, with a panel of NASA and other scientists and engineers reviewing 22 submissions. Two were chosen – one led by a postdoctoral research scientist and the other a university professor.

The launcher for this week’s Arianespace Soyuz mission is now ready for the countdown to its 11 September (UTC) lift-off, having been “topped off” with the payload of two European Galileo satellites.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) have agreed to co-operate in providing opportunities to deploy cube satellites (CubeSats) from the Japanese Experiment Module “Kibo” of the International Space Station (ISS).

On its eighth launch of 2015 and the 12th Soyuz launch from the Guiana Space Center, Arianespace will orbit the two latest satellites in the Galileo global navigation system on 11 September (UTC).

A Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket has been sent from the manufacturer in Samara to the Vostochny space centre for the launch, in a ceremony attended by Russian Deputy Defense Minister Dmitry Rogozin.

King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, has designed a 12-year space programme that envisions the launch of a small satellite every two or three years.

Boeing has renamed its commercial crew transportation spacecraft CST-100 Starliner. The spacecraft will be assembled and processed for launch at the revitalised Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility, or C3PF, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.