Satellite News

Recently inside the clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, engineers successfully completed two deployments for the James Webb Space Telescope’s “wings” or side portions of the backplane structure that fold up.

SES Techcom Services announced it will be expanding its Astra Connect broadband service in Africa for the Enterprise and Oil & Gas markets via the Newtec Dialog multiservice platform on SES’s Astra 2G satellite.

Rocket: Soyuz 2-1B; Payload: EKS-1 (EKS No. 1, Tundra [?]); Date: 17 November 2015, 0634 UTC; Launch site: Plesetsk, Russian. The governmental spacecraft, a new early warning system satellite, was accurately placed on the target orbit. This was the thirteenth Soyuz family mission in 2015.

United Launch Alliance said it would not bid for the next U.S. Air Force global positioning system (GPS) satellite launch, effectively ceding the competition to privately held SpaceX.

Through a contract signed with the European Space Agency (ESA), Airbus Defence and Space continues to develop Eurostar Neo, its new generation of platforms for geostationary telecommunication satellites. Under phase C/D of the NEOSAT programme, this contract will lead to the development of the complete Eurostar Neo product line.

COM DEV International Ltd. has signed a long-term agreement (LTA) to supply satellite switch products to a major prime contractor. The contract assures COM DEV of C$8.5 million of switch orders over the two-year duration of the agreement.

UAE-based satellite operator Yahsat and Hughes Network Systems announced the award of a major contract for Hughes to deliver its JUPITER System and related network operations services in support of Yahsat’s planned expansion across Africa in early 2017 with the launch of its new Ka-band satellite, Al Yah 3.

The Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) Satellite, developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is expected to be launched at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in mid-December.