Satellite News

Rocket: OS-M1 “Chongqing-Liangjiang Star,” Payload: Lingque-1B; Date: 27 March 2019, 0932 UTC; Launch site: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China. The rocket failed after separation of the first stage one minute into flight.

Iran launched a satellite on 15 January but the spacecraft failed to reach orbit, state television quoted the telecommunications minister as saying.

Another attempt to restore control over Russia’s radio telescope Spektr-R has failed, Alexander Bloshenko, adviser on science to the chief of Russia’s state space corporation Roskosmos, was quoted as saying.

NASA said it continues to work toward recovering the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, which suspended operations on Tuesday, 8 January.

The Spektr-R space radio telescope’s transmission device failure may have been caused by cosmic radiation accumulated in the spacecraft’s electronics during the past eight years, a source in the Russian space industry was quoted as saying by TASS.

Maxar Technologies Inc. reported that its WorldView-4 satellite (formerly known as GeoEye-2) experienced a failure in its control moment gyros (“CMGs”), preventing the satellite from collecting imagery due to the loss of an axis of stability.

Oleg Skorobogatov, the head of the commission that probed the 11 October Soyuz FG accident, said the flight was aborted because part of a sensor that indicates the separation of the stages of the rocket was damaged during assembly at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Roskosmos executive director Sergey Krikalev confirmed that the failure of a Soyuz FG on 11 October was indeed caused by a collision between the first and second stages after separation. In related news, three more Soyuz launches are planned before the next crewed mission, tentatively scheduled for 3 December. The Soyuz failure reportedly has also caused some insurance problems for at least one future launch.