Satellite News

The U.S. Air Force’s DMSP F19 weather satellite, which failed two years into its planned five-year lifetime, cannot be recovered, officials said.

A reaction wheel on Taiwan’s Formosat-2 imaging satellite failed on 21 June.

Japan’s space agency said that the ASTRO-H ‘Hitomi’ x-ray satellite has failed, concluding a month-long effort to salvage the ambitious project closely watched across the globe.

It has emerged that the defragmentation of Japan’s ASTRO-H “Hitomi” x-ray satellite was preceded by a loss of attitude control.

Ten pieces of debris are currently being tracked that resulted from the recent Hitomi (Astro-H) defragmentation event. The bad news is that one of them seems to be rather large.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said that communication with the X-ray Astronomy Satellite “Hitomi” (ASTRO-H), launched on 17 February 2016 (UTC), failed at the start of its operation originally scheduled for 0740UTC, Saturday, 26 March.

According to General John Hyten, the head of U.S. Air Force Space Command, there is little hope that the malfunctioning DMSP-19 military weather satellite can be rescued.

Roskosmos has announced that the recently launched Resurs P3 satellite successfully reached its operational orbit following the first of the two planned manoeuvres despite an only partially deployed solar array.