Satellite News

Rocket: Falcon 9; Payload: PAZ, Microsat-2a, Microsat-2b; Date: 22 February 2018, 1417 UTC; Launch site: Vandenberg Air Force Base, USA. Ten minutes after launch, the PAZ satellite separated from the launcher and will soon be positioned at its 514 km orbit.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter arrived at Mars in October 2016 in an initial, highly elliptical four-day orbit of about 98,000 x 200 km. Since March 2017, ESA had been conducting an aerobraking campaign, slowing the craft and lowering its orbit (to sometimes just 103 km altitude). At 1720 UTC on 20 February, ExoMars fired its thrusters for about 16 minutes to raise the closest approach to the surface to about 200 km, well out of the atmosphere.

SpaceX called off an attempted launch of its Falcon 9 rocket due to strong high-altitude winds. The Falcon 9 launcher was scheduled to lift off at 1417 UTC from Vandenberg Air Force Base, USA.

Aerojet Rocketdyne and NASA have powered up the RS-25 main engine for the agency’s heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) to its highest thrust levels yet.

On 21 February 2008, the German radar satellite TerraSAR-X and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency satellite NFIRE, both equipped with Laser Communication Terminals (LCT) manufactured by Tesat-Spacecom, established the first successful and stable orbital laser link.

On 16 February 2018, standalone check-outs of the Soyuz-ST-B LV Control System began in the Guiana Space Center as part of the O3b launch campaign which is to result in orbital injection of the four European telecommunication satellites.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) newest weather satellite, Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-S (GOES-S), is scheduled to launch on 1 March.

Lockheed Martin has completed assembly on the Arabsat-6A satellite, which was recently shipped to its Sunnyvale, California facility to begin a comprehensive series of tests to ensure the satellite is ready for operations in orbit.