Satellite News

QinetiQ technology will be responsible for guiding the European Space Agency’s IXV ‘space taxi’ safely back to Earth on its maiden test flight, due for launch on 11 February 2015, the company said.

On 4 February 2015, specialists from RSCC and ISS Reshetnev company have succeeded in fully restoring communications and broadcasting services on Ekspress-AM33.

The telecommunications satellite Yamal-401, designed and built by ISS-Reshetnev Company, has started operating.

Aerojet Rocketdyne has received a contract from Orbital Sciences Corporation to deliver XR-5 electric propulsion subsystems over the next three years for the next generation GEOStar-3 commercial geostationary orbit communications satellite platform.

Millennium Space Systems announced that it has finalised an exclusive production license for the patented “Demisable Integrated Reaction Wheel Assembly” (DIRWA) from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

European Space Propulsion (ESP), a wholly owned subsidiary of Aerojet Rocketdyne, recently received a contract from Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space for the initial development of a new electronic controller for the XR-5 Hall Thruster. The contract was issued under the European Space Agency (ESA)-sponsored Neosat programme, an initiative strongly supported by the UK Space Agency.

An ILS Proton M/Briz M is to launch the Inmarsat-5 F2 communications satellite from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on 1 February 2015 at 1231 UTC. It will be the first ILS mission of 2015.

MESSENGER mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) successfully conducted a manoeuvre designed to raise the spacecraft’s minimum altitude sufficiently to extend orbital operations and delay the probe’s inevitable impact onto Mercury’s surface until early next spring.