Satellite News

Vector, a nanosatellite launch company, and Open Cosmos, a space mission provider, announced an agreement to reserve five orbital launches between 2019 and 2023 on the Vector-R launch vehicle. The announcement comes in advance of Vector’s first orbital launch in July.

Ball Aerospace delivered the TIRS-2 Flight Cryocooler for the Landsat 9 TIRS-2 instrument ahead of schedule to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Achieving this milestone early will allow GSFC additional time and options during the instrument integration and test phase.

Maxar Technologies Ltd. announced plans to move its corporate headquarters to Westminster, Colorado from San Francisco.

Microsat Systems Canada Inc (“MSCI”) announced that they have selected MDA, a Maxar Technologies company, to provide the payload for a MSCI’s microsatellite based Synthetic Aperture Radar.

On 31 January NASA ended the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer’s (TES) almost 14-year operation. Launched in 2004 on NASA’s Aura spacecraft, TES was the first instrument designed to monitor ozone in the lowest layers of the atmosphere directly from space. Its high-resolution observations led to new measurements of atmospheric gases that have altered our understanding of the Earth system.

Rocket: Soyuz-2.1a; Payload: Progress MS-08 [Progress P69]; Date: 13 February 2018, 0813 UTC; Launch site: Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The Progress cargo transportation spacecraft developed and built by RSC Energia was successfully put into a low Earth orbit.

Designed for a contractual orbital life of 10 years, the Eutelsat 16C/SESAT telecommunications satellite has now been deorbited after 17 years and 10 months of operational service.

In order to help minimise early stage satellite mission failures, Infostellar has released a web-based LEOP (Launch and Early Orbit phase) support tool for amateur UHF satellites called StellarStation Amateur.