Satellite News

October has already seen a Harvest Moon, now this week comes a “proxigean” new moon, and to finish out this month we’ll have a “Halloween Micro Blue Moon.” We’ll explain.

Rocket: Soyuz 2.1-a; Payload: Soyuz MS-17; Date: 14 October 2020, 0545 UTC; Launch site: Baikonur, Kazakhstan. At o848 UTC, just a little bit more than three hours after its lift-off, the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft completed a normal docking with the Rassvet module of the Russian Segment of the International Space Station.

The Swedish government has announced a decision to establish capability to launch small satellites from Esrange Space Center in northern Sweden.

Spaceflight Inc. said it will execute two launches on two different continents in a matter of weeks; one aboard a Rocket Lab Electron and the other on NewSpace India Limited’s (NSIL) PSLV. For both missions, Spaceflight arranged the launch and is providing mission management and rideshare integration services for its customers Canon Electronics, Kleos Space and Spire.

Airbus has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) as prime contractor for the Mars Sample Return’s Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) – the first ever spacecraft to bring samples back to Earth from Mars.

Airbus and Thales Alenia Space have been selected by the European Space Agency to compete in the definition phase of the European Large Logistic Lander (EL3) moon lander.

Telesat U.S. Services, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Telesat, has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the development and in-orbit demonstration of commercial low-Earth-orbit (LEO) spacecraft buses in a LEO constellation network with robust low-latency communications features as part of DARPA’s Blackjack programme.

Two big pieces of space junk are zooming toward a close approach that will occur Thursday (Oct. 15) at 8:56 p.m. EDT (0056 GMT on Oct. 16), according to California-based tracking company LeoLabs.