Satellite News

Airbus has successfully tested stratospheric 4G/5G defence applications with a high-altitude balloon demonstration. The technology tested, an Airbus LTE AirNode, represents a key part of Airbus’ secure networked airborne military communications project, Network for the Sky (NFTS).

Boeing has completed the acquisition of Millennium Space Systems, a provider of agile, flight-proven small-satellite solutions.

Three new ideas have been chosen to compete as the tenth Earth Explorer mission. The decision follows the release of a call for ideas in September 2017.

DigitalGlobe, a Maxar company, announced that it has been awarded a contract valued at US$3.2 million by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to provide an unclassified environment with multi-source content for geospatial cloud analytics.

GHGSat, a company providing global emissions monitoring services, announced a US$10 million Series A2 financing led by OGCI Climate Investments. Building on GHGSat’s pioneering achievements in detecting and quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from industrial facilities around the world, the company will use the new capital to accelerate commercialisation efforts, expand its custom analytics services for its growing customer base, as well as fund the launch of an additional GHGSat satellite.

UrtheCast Corp announced that it has signed a binding contract for US$25 million to provide data from the company’s planned UrtheDaily Constellation to a long-established commercial Earth Observation operator and value-added services provider on the Indian subcontinent.

Rocket: H-IIB; Payload: H-II Transfer Vehicle “KOUNOTORI7” (HTV7); Date: 22 September 2018, 1752 UTC; Launch site: Tanegashima Space Center, Japan. A little more than 15 minutes after launch, the unpiloted HTV-7 cargo spacecraft successfully separated from the rocket and began its four-and-a-half day approach to the International Space Station.

Arianespace’s upcoming mission from the Spaceport in French Guiana – which will mark the heavy-lift Ariane 5’s 100th launch – has been cleared for lift-off next week with a dual-satellite payload.