Satellite News

ESA’s SMOS satellite completed its six-month commissioning this week and formally began operational life.

Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) said it completed the preliminary design review for the propulsion system that it is building for a NASA spacecraft that will study the lunar atmosphere.

Newsat said it had made “strong progress in its program to launch a geo-stationary satellite within the next 30 months” but did not report any specific progress.
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New scientific and military satellites deliver more data than their predecessors, creating a potential bandwidth problem. Experiments conducted by Sandia National Laboratories at the International Space Station preliminarily indicate that the problem could be remedied by orbiting more complex computer chips to pre-reduce large data streams.
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SES World Skies has signed an agreement with Astrium for the procurement of a new satellite to be named SES-6.
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The two Prisma satellites have left Sweden and are expected to arrive at Yasny, Russia, on 19 May. Launch aboard a Dnepr rocket is now scheduled for 15 June – one year later than originally planned.
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NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) passed a major milestone on 14 May, when it completed its post-launch check out and officially began its five-year science mission to study the Sun.
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One flip of a bit in the memory of an onboard computer appears to have caused the change in the science data pattern returning from Voyager 2, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.
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