Satellite News

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is on final approach to Saturn, following confirmation by mission navigators that it is on course to dive into the planet’s atmosphere on Friday, 15 September.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded Teledyne e2v a EUR42million contract to produce high-end Charge Coupled Device (CCD) visible-light detectors for the PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission.

The production of Airbus’ four new very high resolution satellites, which together will form the Pleiades Neo constellation, is well on schedule for launch in 2020.

A Proton M launch vehicle, utilising a 5-burn Briz M mission design, is to lift off from Pad 39 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with the Amazonas 5 satellite on board at 1923 UTC on 11 September.

Brazil’s Embratel has announced its 12th satellite, the largest ever made for the company.

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. announced that it has signed a multi-million dollar contract with Boeing Satellite Systems, Inc. to supply a communication antenna subsystem for the Amos-17 satellite.

AZUR SPACE SOLAR POWER GmbH announced that it has been awarded a Multi-Year, Long-Term Purchase Agreement (LTPA) for high-efficiency, multi-junction space solar cells by Space Systems Loral (SSL) to support SSL’s next generation solar arrays.

EchoStar Corporation and Lockheed Martin announced that the EchoStar III satellite has been successfully recovered following an anomaly that occurred in late July and retired.