Satellite News

NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) programme in April 2015 requested proposals for interplanetary CubeSat investigations, with a panel of NASA and other scientists and engineers reviewing 22 submissions. Two were chosen – one led by a postdoctoral research scientist and the other a university professor.

King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, has designed a 12-year space programme that envisions the launch of a small satellite every two or three years.

Boeing has renamed its commercial crew transportation spacecraft CST-100 Starliner. The spacecraft will be assembled and processed for launch at the revitalised Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility, or C3PF, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

According to ISRO, GSAT 6 has been successfully positioned in its orbital slot of 83 degrees East and co-located with INSAT 4A, GSAT 12, GSAT 10 and IRNSS1C, after carrying out four drift arresting manoeuvres.

Seven weeks after New Horizons sped past the Pluto system to study Pluto and its moons, the mission team will begin intensive downlinking of the tens of gigabits of data the spacecraft collected and stored on its digital recorders. The entire downlink will be taking about one year to complete.

Yosemite Space worked as part of Team Miles to win the NASA Cube Quest Competition, Ground Tournament 1. Yosemite Space contributed radiation shielding designs and mitigation strategies, structure designs and onboard computing. Team Miles will fly Yosemite Space’s Resilient Affordable Cubesat Processor (RACP) as part of the NASA contest.

Mission managers for NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory have determined that its radar, one of the satellite’s two science instruments, can no longer return data.

Arx Pax, creator of Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA ) and hover engine technology, announced that it has entered into a Space Act Agreement (SAA) with NASA. The purpose of the collaboration is to use Arx Pax’s MFA to create micro-satellite capture devices that can manipulate and couple satellites from a distance. This can be achieved by using a magnetic tether between the objects.