Satellite News

Rocket: Soyuz ST-A/Fregat; Payload: COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation, CHEOPS (Characterising Exoplanet Satellite) and three auxiliary payloads: EyeSat, OPS-SAT and ANGELS; Date: 18 December 2019, 0854 UTC; Launch site: Sinnamary, French Guiana. The launcher flew a four-hour-plus profile to release its multi-satellite payload into Sun-synchronous orbit – beginning with primary passenger COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation, then CHEOPS (Characterising Exoplanet Satellite) and three auxiliary payloads: EyeSat, OPS-SAT and ANGELS.

NASA has selected United Launch Services LLC (ULS) of Centennial, Colorado, to provide launch services for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-T (GOES-T) mission, which will provide advanced imagery and atmospheric measurements of Earth’s weather, oceans and environment, real-time mapping of total lightning activity, and improved monitoring of solar activity and space weather.

The Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China’s Sichuan Province will host around 20 launch missions in 2020, including two satellites of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), according to an official from the centre.

Rocket Lab has begun construction on a new launch pad located at Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. The new pad will be the company’s third launch pad for the Electron launch vehicle, joining the existing pad at Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand and the newly opened pad at Launch Complex 2 in Virginia, USA.

Capella Space, an information services company that provides on-demand Earth observation imagery, has signed a contract with the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), to study the integration of its synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery into the NRO’s national ground architecture.