Satellite News

ITT Exelis has been awarded a contract by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to provide specialised antennas for the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere & Climate-2 (COSMIC-2) programme.

Ensuring the early interoperability of Europe’s satellite navigation with GPS, the four Galileo satellites have begun broadcasting the ‘offset’ between the parallel navigation systems’ timings, accurate to a few billionths of a second.

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is no longer in standby automode and has resumed normal operations.

The first of six instruments that will fly on GOES-R, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s next-generation of geostationary operational environmental satellites, has been completed seven months before its scheduled installation onto the spacecraft.

NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) Observatory recently completed the Thermal-Vacuum (TVAC) phase of environmental testing at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.

NASA’s is preparing to operate its Kepler spacecraft after the failure of a reaction wheel, which is now expected to occur “sooner rather than later”.

On 29 March 2012, the science team for NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope learned that the defunct Kosmos 1805 spy satellite would pass too close for comfort on 4 April. An evasive manoeuvre was successfully performed.

During a moratorium on commanding this month while Mars passed nearly behind the sun – a phase called solar conjunction — NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity entered a type of standby mode.