Satellite News

Rocket: Atlas V; Payload: OA-7/Cygnus; Date: 18 April 2017, 1511 UTC; Launch site: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, USA. The mission was flown for Orbital ATK under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services contract and the payload will deliver supplies, equipment and experiments to astronauts aboard the ISS.

Thales Alenia Space has sent South Korea the third of three panels making up the communications payloads on the two GEO-KOMPSAT-2 satellites being built by Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).

NASA’s partnership in a future European Space Agency (ESA) mission to Jupiter and its moons has cleared a key milestone, moving from preliminary instrument design to implementation phase.

On 10 April 2017, Naoki Okumura, President of JAXA, and Jean-Yves Le Gall, President of CNES, signed an Implementing Arrangement on Martian Moons Exploration (MMX).

Rocket: Chang Zheng 3B/G2; Payload: Shijian-13 [SJ-13, Chinasat-16]; Date: 12 April 2017, 1104 UTC; Launch site: Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China. The country’s first high throughput satellite was deployed into geostationary transfer orbit.

Russia plans to hold two launches from its newest Vostochny space centre in the Far East this December, the head of the Roskosmos space corporation told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta government daily.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has entered a hibernation phase on 7 April that will last until early September.

Raytheon has completed an upgrade and final testing of the data transport and processing system for the Joint Polar Satellite System Common Ground System which provides weather and environmental data used by NASA, NOAA, the U.S. Department of Defense and the agencies’ international partners.