Satellite News

Telesat U.S. Services, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Telesat, has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the development and in-orbit demonstration of commercial low-Earth-orbit (LEO) spacecraft buses in a LEO constellation network with robust low-latency communications features as part of DARPA’s Blackjack programme.

NanoAvionics has signed a contract with US-company Accion Systems to host their propulsion system, TILE 3, on-board its new rideshare mission for a demonstration flight in 2021. Accion Systems procured this flight as the culmination of an ongoing U.S. government sponsored propulsion programme.

ENPULSION said it has launched the ENPULSION MICRO to cover the propulsion needs of heavier satellites which want to use the FEEP technology currently used in the company’s NANO product range. First units have already been shipped to customers.

China’s Mars probe Tianwen-1 successfully conducted a deep-space manoeuvre on Friday, according to the China National Space Administration.

Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) has announced the launch of the Kepler-4 and Kepler-5 CubeSats.

General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) announced that it has received a contract extension for a second year of operations of their Orbital Test Bed (OTB) spacecraft supporting the NASA/JPL Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC) mission.

Ball Aerospace has shipped the Ozone Mapping Profile Suite (OMPS) instrument for integration onto NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2) weather satellite.

Boeing and the U.S. Space Force successfully completed the first major engineering design review for the Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS)-11+ military communications satellite. Production will begin next year at Boeing’s El Segundo factory, with delivery scheduled for 2024.