Satellite News

The Kepler spacecraft has been recovered and it is back on the job as the K2 mission searching for exoplanets – planets beyond our solar system.

Frequency Electronics, Inc. has been awarded an approximately US$15 million contract to supply multi-frequency timing systems for a US/DOD satellite programme.

The launch of Sentinel-1B and a few piggyback satellites aboard a Soyuz 2-1a from French Guiana has been rescheduled for 23 April.

China will launch about 150 of its Chang Zheng rockets over the next five years, one of its space chiefs was quoted as saying.

Russia plans to put a dozen of new communications satellites into the Earth’s orbit in the next nine years, the head of the country’s communications agency Rossvyaz said.

Ball Aerospace has begun environmental testing on the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS-1) satellite. JPSS-1 will represent significant technological and scientific advancements in severe weather prediction and environmental monitoring and will further weather, climate, environmental and oceanographic science, the company said.

The inaugural launch of a modernised Proton-M rocket from Baikonur may be delayed for several weeks, Interfax news agency reported citing a source from the rocket and space industry.

Orbital ATK, Inc. announced that the company’s Iuka, Mississippi, manufacturing plant has produced its 500th large composite rocket structure for United Launch Alliance (ULA) launch vehicles.