Satellite News

The first Eurostar satellite, Inmarsat-2 F1, designed and built by Astrium, was retired from operational service this week and safely decommissioned after it had completed a long and flawless mission in geostationary orbit. It operated for 22.5 years – far outliving its projected life-span of 10 years.

Orbital Sciences Corporation has been selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to design, manufacture, integrate and test a new heliophysics science satellite that will investigate the connection between space weather storms in the ionosphere, located at the edge of outer space, and Earth’s terrestrial weather.

The Herschel satellite, part of the joint scientific mission, Herschel-Planck completed its mission today. Herschel was built by a Thales Alenia Space-led industrial team on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA). Herschel was launched on 14 May 2009 along with the Planck satellite. This scientific observatory had a service life of nearly four years, exceeding its required lifetime by 10%.

Judging from contradictory media reports, it appears unclear whether the recently launched Progress 19M cargo vessel can dock with the ISS as planned on 26 April after an antenna of the spacecraft’s KURS system failed to deploy.

Iridium Communications Inc. announced it has signed an agreement with Harris Corporation to enable the use of expanded hosted payload space on the Iridium NEXT platform, Iridium’s second-generation satellite constellation that is scheduled for launch beginning in early 2015.

Satrec Initiative (SI) of South Korea and the Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST) of United Arab Emirates jointly announced the development programme of the DubaiSat-3 Earth observation small satellite system.

Orbital Sciences Corporation announced that it has been selected by NASA to design, manufacture, integrate and test a new astrophysics satellite that will perform a full-sky search for exoplanets around nearby stars.

Today, Metop-B replaced Metop-A as EUMETSAT’s prime operational polar-orbiting satellite following the end of its commissioning period. Metop-A will continue operations as long as its available capacities bring benefits to users.