Satellite News

Harris Corporation has passed a critical pre-shipment review and initiated a phased delivery and installation of hardware and software that will form the network infrastructure for the ground segment of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite – R Series (GOES-R) programme.

Exelis said it has successfully completed several software upgrades for the new Global Positioning System Next Generation Operational Control System, or GPS OCX. Integration and testing were recently conducted on iteration 1.5 of the OCX navigation, encryption and Mission Upload Generator, or MUG, software.

The Lockheed Martin team developing the U.S. Air Force’s next generation Global Positioning System (GPS) recently turned on power to the bus and network communications equipment payload of the programme’s second satellite designated GPS III Space Vehicle 2 (SV-02).

Following last week’s wake-up of the Rosetta comet-chaser, ESA’s flight controllers have conducted the first in a series of health checks aimed at assessing how well it came through 31 months of hibernation.

DubaiSat-2 has successfully passed the tests conducted by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in collaboration with the Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST), on the satellite’s Propulsion System, in addition to the other examinations ordered to ensure its safety and readiness.

Roskosmos said it is working with aerospace enterprises on the creation of radar satellites.

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is scheduled to launch on 27 February from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. The observatory will link data from a constellation of current and planned satellites to produce next-generation global measurements of rainfall and snowfall from space.

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has completed integration of WorldView-3, the next generation commercial remote-sensing satellite being built for DigitalGlobe. WorldView-3, the fourth remote-sensing satellite built for DigitalGlobe by Ball, is scheduled to launch from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base in summer 2014.