Satellite News

Construction of NASA’s next-generation hurricane-observing satellite mission now is underway in Texas. NASA’s Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission, a constellation of eight microsatellites, will improve hurricane forecasting by making measurements of ocean surface winds in and near the eye wall of tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes throughout their life cycle.

Airbus Defence and Space has designed and built a payload platform for the International Space Station (ISS) for NanoRacks LLC, a privately-owned U.S. space company. The platform will be installed outside of the ISS, and will be used to carry out multiple experiments to be carried out with a wide variety of payloads in zero gravity conditions.

NASA has executed a contract with Bigelow Aerospace for the company to develop human spaceflight missions that leverage its B330 space habitat.

e2v said it has launched a new grade of high-performance microprocessors based on the multicore processors from the Freescale QorIQ family. These processors still produce tens of Gflop of performance, but in addition deliver space grade reliability through e2v’s radiation-tolerant semiconductor technology.

After more than 10 days in space, China’s 19th Beidou navigation satellite is working autonomously and has set up a link with another satellite.

NASA’s Game Changing Development (GCD) programme has selected two proposals for Phase II awards targeted toward developing new energy storage technologies to replace the battery systems currently used by the agency’s space programme.

Scientists have completed their initial calibration of the two instruments on NASA’s new Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite observatory, launched on 31 January. The other instrument, however, still isn’t working.

Ad Astra Rocket Company and NASA have successfully completed contract negotiations on the company’s Next Space Technology Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) award, announced on 31 March 2015, and now enter the execution phase of the project.