Satellite News

RUAG Space received an order from Airbus Defence and Space to deliver a deployable camera mast for the Mars rover element of the European-Russian collaborative ExoMars mission, for which Thales Alenia Space Italy has entered a contract with European Space Agency ESA to undertake the ExoMars Implementation Project as Prime Contractor.

Teledyne Technologies Incorporated announced that its subsidiary, Teledyne Brown Engineering, Inc. (TBE), in Huntsville, Alabama, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) formalised their commercial space imaging partnership to use the International Space Station (ISS) for Earth observation with the signing of an Implementation Agreement.

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has completed thermal vacuum environmental tests on critical components for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Membrane Optic Imager Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE) telescope. Two sections of the primary mirror composite back structure and the structure deployment hinges successfully underwent environmental tests to simulate the temperature range and vacuum of a space environment.

OmniEarth LLC announced a partnership with Harris Corp., Draper Laboratory and Dynetics to create a constellation of satellites to deliver high resolution analytics-grade, multispectral imagery data and products, and hosted payloads to commercial and government customers. Imagery data and products will be for subscribers in the agriculture, energy, natural resources, mobile services and government communities.

ESA and Airbus Defence and Space as the industrial prime contractor have signed the first contractual documents to start the development and construction of a series of MetOp Second Generation (MetOp-SG) weather satellites.

The team preparing NASA’s next Mars lander mission gained a green light today to begin building the spacecraft, which will study how Earthlike planets form. Lockheed Martin will now begin building the InSight spacecraft.

Orbital Sciences Corporation announced that Thaicom PCL has authorised the company to begin the development, manufacturing, integration and testing process for the Thaicom 8 commercial communications satellite.

NASA has awarded ITT Space Systems LLC, a subsidiary of Exelis, Inc. a contract to provide the Radiation Budget Instrument (RBI), a scanning radiometer capable of measuring Earth’s reflected sunlight and emitted thermal radiation.