Satellite News

China’s Mars probe Tianwen-1 has successfully carried out its second orbital correction, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

L3Harris Technologies has finished figuring, polishing and coating the primary mirror for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, formerly known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), bringing it one step closer to launch.

MethaneSAT said it has reached an important new milestone with completion of the Critical Design Review (CDR) phase for both the mission’s remote sensing instrument and the spacecraft platform bus. Completion of the CDR means that MethaneSAT is now entering the production stage with a design that exceeds anticipated capabilities.

China’s satellite producer GalaxySpace announced that its new broadband communication satellite has entered the assembly stage after the company completed the development of satellite payloads.

China plans to launch Taiji-2, a satellite to conduct in-orbit experiments on key technologies related to space-based gravitational wave detection, before 2024, Wu Yueliang, chief scientist of the Taiji programme, was quoted as saying.

The sixth Lockheed Martin-built Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF-6) protected communications satellite successfully completed in-orbit tests on 27 August 2020.

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc. announced it will begin offering data services to characterise spacecraft in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO). This has great value for Space Domain Awareness (SDA) and will be offered to government and commercial organisations internationally, the company said.

The unmanned Hayabusa2 probe will explore the asteroid 1998KY26 after completing its current mission of delivering a capsule believed to be containing samples of sand from the asteroid Ryugu to Earth, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said.