Satellite News

Foreign particles inside a pump or violations of assembly procedures may have been to blame for the loss of the Progress MS-04 cargo space vehicle last December, Russian space corporation Roskosmos said.

China has received images from a pair of 0.5-meter high-resolution remote sensing satellites launched in late December last year. According to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the satellites have reached their operational orbit after a partial launch failure.

SpaceX said an investigation has concluded that the explosion of its Falcon 9 rockets on 1 September 2016 occurred due to the failure of a helium pressure vessel. The company added it was taking steps to avoid the problem for its return to flight, which is now set for 8 January.

The two recently launched SuperView-1 (Gaojing-1) Chinese imaging satellites were deployed into in a lower-than-expected orbit, indicating a partial failure of the Chang Zheng 2D launch vehicle.

Russia’s the Progress MS-04 cargo spacecraft was lost in a Soyuz-U launch failure. The rocket and its payload disintegrated in the skies over Southern Siberia after what appeared to be a catastrophic failure of the rocket’s third stage.

SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said investigators had figured out why a Falcon 9 rocket burst into flames on 1 September as it was being fuelled for a routine, preflight test. The accident destroyed the US$200 million Israeli communications satellite Amos 6 and grounded the Falcon 9 fleet for the second time in 14 months.

SpaceX said the Accident Investigation Team continues to make progress in examining the anomaly on 1 September that led to the loss of a Falcon 9 and its payload at Launch Complex 40 (LC-40), Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are evaluating an alternate way to collect and process science data from the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) instrument on NASA’s Aura spacecraft following the age-related failure of a critical instrument component.