Satellite News

The UK-built Solar Orbiter is preparing to leave the Airbus factory in Stevenage to travel to Germany for testing, ahead of its launch in 2020 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA.

The assembly and testing facility of the Baikonur cosmodrome which will be used for the launch of OneWeb satellites atop Russian rockets will go through a reconstruction ahead of the beginning of the launches, a source at the cosmodrome was quoted as saying.

On 12 September, in an extraordinary general meeting held in the form of voting by correspondence, shareholders of RSC Energia elected Sergey Yurievich Romanov as the General Director of the Corporation.

Rocket: PSLV-C42 (core-alone version); Payload: NovaSAR, S1-4; Date: 16 September 2018, 16347 UTC; Launch site: Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, India. Both satellites were injected into 583 km Sun Synchronous Orbit.

Rocket: Delta II; Payload: Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2); Date: 15 September 2018, 1302 UTC; Launch site: Vandenberg Air Force Base, USA. This marks the final mission of the Delta II rocket, which first launched on 14 February 1989, and launched 155 times including ICESat-2.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have cancelled launch of the H-IIB Launch Vehicle No. 7 (H-IIB F7) with the H-II Transfer Vehicle “KOUNOTORI7” (HTV7) aboard.

The U.S. Air Force announced selection of Lockheed Martin for a fixed-price-type production contract for 22 GPS III Follow-On satellites with a total estimated contract value up to US$7.2 billion.

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission team plans to switch to a backup system in the Microwave Instrument (MWI) on one of the twin spacecraft this month. Following the switch-over, GRACE-FO is expected to quickly resume science data collection.