Satellite News

A collaboration between Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI) and Thoth Technology brings the 46-meter radio astronomy antenna at the Algonquin Radio Observatory (ARO) to the commercial space situational awareness (SSA) market.

Rocket: Falcon 9; Payload: two GRACE Follow-On spacecraft, five Iridium NEXT satellites; Date: 22 May 2018, 1947 UTC; Launch site: Vandenberg Air Force Base,USA. All satellites were successfully deployed into their respective target orbits.

Telesat announced that orbit raising and payload testing on its Phase 1 LEO satellite have been completed and that the spacecraft is now ready to support live demonstrations of its capabilities.

Rocket: Antares; Payload: Cygnus “S.S. J.R. Thompson”; Date: 21 May 2018, 0844 UTC; Launch site: Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, Wallops Island, USA. Following an approximate nine-minute ascent, the Cygnus vessel was successfully deployed into orbit.

Rocket: Chang Zheng-4C; Payload: Queqiao, Longjiang-1, Longjiang-2; Date: 20 May 2018, 2128 UTC; Launch site: Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China. About 25 minutes after lift-off, the satellite separated from the rocket and entered an Earth-Moon transfer orbit with a perigee of 200 km and an apogee of about 400,000 km. Meanwhile, the solar panels and the communication antennas were unfolded.

Lockheed Martin recently put its fifth Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF-5) satellite through its paces in realistic simulations of its future launch experience. The satellite completed the tests successfully and is now in system-level testing in preparation for delivery to the U.S. Air Force in 2019.

The launch of a Soyuz MS spacecraft by a Soyuz-2.1a is planned for August 2019. The spacecraft will fly unmanned, which will make it possible to increase the payload by several times due to the lack of a part of the instruments and assemblies required to support crew activities. Currently, the unmanned version of the Soyuz MS is at the stage of compartments assembly.

The SpaceDataHighway system – the world’s first ‘optical fibre in the sky’ based on cutting-edge laser technology – has achieved 10,000 successful laser connections. The reliability rate has reached 99.8%, and during the first one and a half years of routine operations these successful connections have downloaded more than 500 terabytes of data.