Satellite News

Almost all Arianespace staff have reportedly left the Kourou space centre in French Guiana after several cases of the new coronavirus-related disease have been identified in a community nearby.

SpaceLogistics LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Corporation has been selected by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as its commercial partner for the agency’s Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) programme.

Due to additional checks to be performed on the Fregat upper stage of the Soyuz flight VS24, the launch from the French Guiana Space Center is postponed.

The next launch of a GLONASS-M navigation satellite from Plesetsk is scheduled for 16 March, the Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems Company (the producer of GLONASS satellites) announced.

The launch of GISAT-1 onboard GSLV-F10, planned for 5 March 2020, was postponed due to technical reasons, ISRO said.

NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, which had been offline for about nine months due to a technical glitch, is fully operational again, agency experts said.

On 11 February 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft safely executed a flyover of the backup sample collection site Osprey as part of the mission’s activities in orbit around asteroid Bennu. The Canadian OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter (OLA) did not operate as expected during the 11-hour event and has been declared inoperable.

The 3D-printed thrust chamber assembly of the methane-fuelled M10 rocket engine has passed its first series of hot firing tests. The M10 engine will power the upper stage of future Vega evolutions from 2025.