Satellite News

Astrobotic announced that it selected United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket in a competitive commercial procurement to launch its Peregrine lunar lander to the moon in 2021.

Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) manoeuvre was completed successfullyon 20 August 2019. The duration of manoeuvre was 1,738 seconds beginning from 0432 UTC. With this, Chandrayaan-2 was successfully inserted into a Lunar orbit. The orbit achieved is 114 km x 18,072 km.

One of the key instruments on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars rover, the Panoramic Camera (PanCam) has been fitted and integrated in the Airbus bio-burden cleanroom in Stevenage.

Rocket: Electron/Curie; Payload: Breizh Reconnaissance Orbiter 1 (BRO-1), Global-4, 2 x Pearl White; Date: 19 August 1212 UTC); Launch site: Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand. All four satellites were successfully deployed.

ISS-Reshetnev Company has completed building and already sent to its European partner – Thales Alenia Space – a payload module structure for the Ekspress-AMU7 satellite.

ThinKom Solutions introduced a new gateway concept, which the company describes as an “array of arrays” that will provide a superior alternative to the large “antenna farms” of parabolic dishes currently used for support of geostationary (GEO) satellites.

Rocket: Smart Dragon-1 (SD-1, Jielong 1); Payload: three microsats; Date: 17 August 2018, 0411 UTC, Launch site: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China. The three satellites were placed into the targeted orbit. They will be used for remote sensing services, communication and Internet of Things.

The U.S. Air Force’s Rocket Systems Launch Program Office, part of the Space and Missile Systems Center’s Launch Enterprise, has released a solicitation for the Orbital Services Program-4 Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract.