Satellite News

Arianespace has not accepted the offer by the Russian Lavochkin Research and Production Association to “patch up” the rupture in the pipeline that supplies helium to fuel tanks of the Fregat booster on the Soyuz-ST carrier rocket at the Guiana space centre, a source in the rocket and space industry was quoted as saying by Sputnik.

The Canadian Department of National Defence has awarded a C$15 million contract to Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) for development of multipurpose microsatellites to support Arctic surveillance.

It’s been over a month since engineers have heard from the pair of briefcase-sized spacecraft known collectively as MarCO , which followed NASA’s InSight to the Red Planet. At this time, the mission team considers it unlikely they’ll be heard from again.

The Iridium NEXT constellation of satellites, developed and built by Thales Alenia Space, is now fully operational. Following eight successful launches between January 2017 and January 2019, a total of 75 Iridium NEXT satellites are now fully deployed in low Earth orbit (LEO). More specifically, the constellation operates with 66 satellites at an altitude of about 780 kilometers, distributed in six orbital planes of 11 satellites each, backed by nine in-orbit replacement satellites and six ground spares.