Satellite News

MDA has been awarded a contract from the Canadian Space Agency to execute the system design phase of a forest fire monitoring satellite called WildFireSat.

The Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU) together with the Lebedev Physical Institute has developed nanosatellites for the Yarilo project for studying the Sun. The satellites are planned for launch into orbit in 2020, the BMSTU Youth Space Center said.

Airbus has completed the ocean satellite ‘Copernicus Sentinel-6A’, and is now sending it to Ottobrunn near Munich in Germany, where over the next six months the satellite will undergo an extensive series of tests at Industrieanlagen Betriebsgesellschaft mbH (IABG) to prove its readiness for space.

Details have emerged regarding the incident involving ESA’s Aeolus and one of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. SpaceX meanwhile blamed a “a bug in our on-call paging system” for its failure to co-ordinate evasive manoeuvres with ESA.

Eutelsat announced its withdrawal from the C-Band Alliance (“CBA”), which has been formally notified to the CBA members.

The Vikram Lander successfully separated from the Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter at 0745 UTC on 2 September 2019. Vikram is currently in a lunar orbit of 119 km x 127 km. The Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter continues to orbit the Moon in its existing orbit.

General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) announced that commissioning of NASA’s Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC), the primary hosted payload on-board the Orbital Test Bed (OTB) satellite, is now underway. GA-EMS’ OTB was successfully launched on 25 June 2019 on board a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

Russia’s space observatory Spektr-RG, which was launched in July to observe the universe at X-ray wavelengths, has moved away from Earth to a distance of 1.6 million kilometers, according to Dmitry Rogozin, chief of Russia’s space corporation Roskosmos.