Satellite News

COROT, the upcoming mission to detect exoplanets and probe the interior of stars, is now scheduled for launch on 27 December 2006 aboard a Soyuz 2-1b/Fregat from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Technical problems that threatened to delay the launch of space shuttle Discovery on the STS-116 mission have been resolved, but bad weather still remained an issue. Notwithstanding, the countdown to the scheduled 0235 UTC lift-off continued at the time of writing.

There is only a 40 percent chance that the weather will allow the launch of space shuttle Discovery on 8 December (UTC). In addition, two technical problems have come up that might delay the launch of STS-116.

Space Exploration Technologies’ second attempt to launch its Falcon 1 rocket was postponed to January or February 2007, the company’s CEO Elon Musk said.

Specialists at the Mission Control Centre based near Moscow have decided not to conduct another ISS orbit correction on 2 December but possibly later, Itar-Tass news agency reports. A problem with an ISS circuit breaker has meanwhile been traced back to a software glitch and is not expected to affect the upcoming shuttle mission to the station.

The largest European single-segment filament-wound case solid propellant motor ever developed successfully completed its first static firing test at the Guiana Space Centre, Europe’s Spaceport, in Kourou, French Guiana.

NASA senior managers unanimously recommended launching the Space Shuttle Discovery on the STS-116 mission on 8 December, 0235 UTC.

The German radar satellite TerraSAR-X will be launched from Baikonur on 27 February 2007 on a Dnepr-1 rocket. This new launch date has now been announced by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) along with its industrial partners Astrium GmbH and Infoterra GmbH, responsible for the commercial exploitation of TerraSAR-X data.