Satellite News

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. announced that its Montreal operation has signed a contract in excess of C$6 million (EUR3.7 million, US$4.6 million) with EADS Astrium for an antenna subsystem for Eutelsat’s KA-SAT satellite.

Chandrayaan-1 has entered deep space after crossing the 150,000 km distance mark from the Earth. This happened after the successful completion of the spacecraft’s third orbit raising manoeuvre on 26 October.

NASA engineers have traced two glitches that shut down the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and said on they rebooted one of the computers involved. If all goes well, the telescope should resume operations by next week, NASA officials said.

The U.S. Defense Department confirmed it has no firm deadline for awarding the TSAT satellite contract, saying it needs time to work up new requirements on what is expected to be a scaled down version of the original programme.

ProtoStar Ltd. said that the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) Radiocommunication Bureau issued a Circular Telegram confirming that ProtoStar I is, and has been, operating fully within applicable ITU rules and regulations since its launch on 7 July 2008.

The first orbit-raising manoeuvre of ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was performed this morning.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has begun environmental testing in a thermal vacuum.

Aerojet, a GenCorp company, announced that it has been selected by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) to provide propulsion systems for NASA’s Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission.