Satellite News

Planet Labs Inc. announced the completion of its previously announced business combination with dMY Technology Group, Inc. IV, a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company [SPAC].

New Symphonie, the recently established consortium of 22 European companies, has won the European Commission call for tenders entitled “New Space solutions for long-term availability of reliable, secure, cost-effective space-based connectivity.”

Smallsat mission integrator NanoAvionics US has received a mission contract by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The 12U (1U equals 10 × 10 × 10 cm³) spacecraft, about the size of a microwave oven, will host the Mini Astrophysical MeV Background Observatory (MAMBO) mission.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) received telemetry data from the RApid Innovative payload demonstration SatellitE-2 (RAISE-2) launched abroad the fifth Epsilon Launch Vehicle (Epsilon-5) on 9 November from Uchinoura Space Center as part of JAXA’s Innovative Satellite Technology Demonstration-2.

NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) and a NASA-U.S. Naval Research Laboratory space weather payload to study the Sun’s radiation lifted off on 7 December aboard the Space Test Program Satellite-6 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida as part of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Test Program 3 (STP-3) mission.

GHGSat said it is building on its momentum to deploy a constellation of satellites in collaboration with ABB. GHGSat’s next three satellites, GHGSat-C3, C4 and C5, will be launched into orbit in summer 2022 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Transporter-5 mission.

Rocket Lab USA, Inc. announced it has signed a deal with Japanese Earth imaging company Synspective to carry out three dedicated Electron launches.

Rocket: Soyuz 2.1a; Payload: Soyuz MS 20; Date: 8 December 2021, 0738 UTC; Launch site: Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Nine minutes into the flight the crewed spacecraft normally separated from the third stage and entered it target near-earth orbit.