Satellite News

Since its capture by the gravity of dwarf planet Ceres on 6 March NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has performed flawlessly, continuing to thrust with its ion engine as planned. The thrust, combined with Ceres’ gravity, is gradually guiding the spacecraft into a circular orbit around the dwarf planet. All of the spacecraft’s systems and instruments are in excellent health.

Aerojet Rocketdyne has been awarded a contract worth approximately US$18 million from NASA Glenn Research Center to complete the development of NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster-Commercial (NEXT-C) Gridded Ion Thruster System.

During its most recent close flyby last Saturday, where Rosetta flew within 14 km of the surface of its target comet, the spacecraft experienced significant difficulties in navigation. This resulted in its high gain antenna starting to drift away from pointing at the Earth, impacting communications, and was subsequently followed by a ‘safe mode’ event. The spacecraft has now been successfully recovered, but it will take a little longer to resume normal scientific operations.

The engineering and technology group SENER has been awarded the contract for the Attitude and Orbit Control System (AOCS/GNC) on the space probe Euclid. This award makes SENER the prime contractor for this AOCS subsystem that requires the highest level of performance

Last month marked the start of preliminary design work on ESA’s Asteroid Impact Mission, or AIM. Intended to demonstrate technologies for future deep-space missions, AIM will also be the Agency’s very first investigation of planetary defence techniques.

COM DEV International Ltd. announced that it has secured four orders totalling nearly C$10 million to supply microwave equipment for communication satellites for new customers from its recently expanded operations in the UK.

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission Core Satellite’s Microwave Imager (GMI) built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. under contract for NASA has performed flawlessly in its first year on orbit as the most accurately calibrated radiometer in the twelve-satellite GPM constellation.

The fourth and final orbit raising operation of IRNSS-1D was successfully completed by firing the Apogee Motor for 493 seconds on 01 April 2015.