Satellite News

The next Galileo launch campaign has begun with the arrival of the latest pair of navigation satellites at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

Rocket: Atlas V 401; Payload: GPS IIF-11 (SVN 73); Date: 31 October 2015, 1613 UTC; Launch site: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, USA: Spacecraft separation into the target orbit occurred at 1936 UTC.

NASA has selected United Launch Services to provide launch services for the agency’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-M (TDRS-M) mission. The mission will launch in October 2017 aboard an Atlas V 401 rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Arianespace has renewed the contracts with Telespazio for the maintenance of ground systems and launch services at the space base in Kourou (French Guyana) until 2019.

A structural test article of the interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) for NASA’s new deep-space exploration rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), has been completed at United Launch Alliance in Decatur, Alabama, prior to handover to Boeing, the prime contractor for the SLS core stage.

Rocket: Chang Zheng 2D; Payload: Tianhui-1C; Date: 26 October 2015, 0710 UTC; Launch site: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China. The mapping satellite was placed into a 490 km x 500 km x 97 degrees orbit.

Arianespace has received the sixth Ariane 5 for launch in 2015, keeping the company on track for a record year of mission activity with its complete launcher family at the Spaceport in French Guiana.

A rare reentry of a suspected rocket body from a very high orbit next month offers an excellent opportunity to gather data to improve our knowledge of how objects interact with Earth’s atmosphere, ESA said.