Satellite News

For the 11th launch of 2015 from the Guiana Space Center, the Vega light launcher on its overall sixth mission, this time on behalf of ESA, will orbit the LISA Pathfinder technology demonstrator, into an elliptical low Earth orbit for a mission to the L1 Lagrange point. Lift-off is scheduled for Wednesday, 2 December 2015, at exactly 0415 UTC.

Space Systems Loral (SSL) has been selected to build a powerful, high throughput communications satellite for Telesat. The new spacecraft, called Telstar 19 VANTAGE, will have two high throughput payloads, one in Ku-band and the other in Ka-band, to serve markets in Latin America, the North Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean and Northern Canada.

NASA has successfully installed the first of 18 flight mirrors onto the James Webb Space Telescope, beginning a critical piece of the observatory’s construction.