Satellite News

On its fourth launch of the year and second with the Ariane 5 heavy launcher, Arianespace will orbit two direct-to-home (DTH) TV broadcast satellites: DirecTV 15, the most powerful direct TV broadcast satellite in the United States For DirecTV; and SkyM-1 for Sky Mexico. Lift-off is planned between 2116 and 2240 UTC on 27 May.

The GOES-R weather satellite, slated to launch in 2016, is ready for environmental testing.

ASTROSAT, the first dedicated Indian astronomy satellite aimed at studying distant celestial objects, has been fully assembled and entered testing.

NASA’s new Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission to map global soil moisture and detect whether soils are frozen or thawed has begun science operations.

DigitalGlobe’s Ikonos commercial imaging satellite, built by Lockheed Martin, was retired on 31 March after a more than 15-year service life. The satellite was owned and operated by DigitalGlobe, Inc., and performed on-orbit for more than double its original design life.

Northrop Grumman Corp. formed a scientific advisory board to guide its efforts to develop a lighter-than-air vehicle to explore Venus’s environment. The company’s Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) concept is a long-lived, manoeuvrable, semi-buoyant platform that would coast through Venus’s clouds gathering atmospheric data.

Sierra Nevada Corporation’s (SNC) Space Systems was competitively selected by Exelis Geospatial Systems to develop and build the Radiation Budget Instrument (RBI) Azimuth Rotation Module (ARM) for the Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2) mission. Exelis is the prime contractor to NASA for the RBI.

The U.S. Air Force has successfully completed the on-orbit checkout of the third Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) sensor operating in a highly elliptical orbit (HEO-3) over the northern hemisphere.