Satellite News

China will finish the construction of the BeiDou-3 Navigation Satellite System (BDS-3), with another two geostationary orbit satellites to be launched before June 2020, according to BDS spokesperson Ran Chengqi.

India has approved its third lunar mission. The Chandrayaan-3 mission will have a lander and a rover, but not an orbiter, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman K. Sivan told reporters.

Boeing has developed a new variant of its 702 satellite for the U.S. Air Force’s Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) constellation, one that offers both greater bandwidth efficiency and signal power than previous satellites in the fleet.

One of Russia’s Meteor-M satellites became uncontrollable following an external impact, presumably a micrometeorite strike, Russia’s Roskosmos state space corporation said on its website. At present, the satellite has resumed controlled flight.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced that its Super Low Altitude Test Satellite “TSUBAME” (SLATS) was registered by the Guinness World Records as having achieved the “lowest altitude by an Earth observation satellite in orbit.”

GomSpace (GS) and Lockheed Martin Space agreed to develop and deliver a tailored GS 6U nanosatellite to Orbital Micro Systems (OMS) in the United Kingdom.

Capella Space, an information services company that provides on-demand Earth observation imagery, has signed a contract with the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), to study the integration of its synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery into the NRO’s national ground architecture.

Satellite remote sensing has widely been used to monitor and characterise the spatial and temporal changes of the Earth’s vegetative cover. Satellites used in these analyses have conventionally been polar-orbiting satellites. The utility of these polar-orbiting satellites has, however, often been limited because frequently occurring clouds block their view of the land surface. New-generation geostationary satellites present an opportunity to observe land surfaces in a more efficient manner.