Satellite News

NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster – Commercial (NEXT-C) fired for the first time recently inside a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. The thruster is undergoing performance testing to verify it can withstand the extreme launch vibrations and hot and cold temperatures of spaceflight.

Rocket: Falcon 9; Payload: 60 Starlink satellites; Date: 11 November 2019, 1456 UTC; Launch site: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, USA. The satellites were released into 280-km orbits.

Aerojet Rocketdyne and NASA recently demonstrated an Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) thruster at full power for the first time, achieving an important programme milestone. Aerojet Rocketdyne-developed AEPS thrusters are slated to be used on the Power and Propulsion Element of NASA’s Gateway, the agency’s orbiting lunar outpost for robotic and human exploration operations in deep space.

NASA will contribute an instrument to a European space mission that will explore the atmospheres of hundreds of planets orbiting stars beyond our Sun, or exoplanets, for the first time.

Spacecom, operator of the Amos satellite fleet, announced that a leading Angolan satellite services company has signed a contract for C-Band HTS capacity on the newly launched Amos-17 communication satellite. The Angolan company will utilise capacity on Amos-17 primarily for cellular backhaul to better connect rural and low-density communities throughout the Southern African country.

The launch of OneWeb satellites from the Baikonur cosmodrome was postponed from December this year to January 2020, three sources in Russia’s rocket and space industry said according to Novosti.

China has successfully tracked and received data from the newly launched Earth observation satellite Gaofen-7, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Viasat, Inc announced financial results for the fiscal second quarter ending 30 September 2019.