Satellite News

ISRO has located its Vikram lander on the moon’s surface with the help of the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, which has taken a thermal image of the lander. Attempts to communicate with the lander have so far been unsuccessful.

Konnect, a high-throughput satellite ordered by Eutelsat – has successfully completed its mechanical test campaign in Thales Alenia Space facilities in Cannes.

The fate of India’s moon lander Vikram was unclear after its attempt to soft-land on the lunar surface. Telemetry was lost at an altitude of 2.1 km.

MDA has been awarded a contract from the Canadian Space Agency to execute the system design phase of a forest fire monitoring satellite called WildFireSat.

The Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU) together with the Lebedev Physical Institute has developed nanosatellites for the Yarilo project for studying the Sun. The satellites are planned for launch into orbit in 2020, the BMSTU Youth Space Center said.

Airbus has completed the ocean satellite ‘Copernicus Sentinel-6A’, and is now sending it to Ottobrunn near Munich in Germany, where over the next six months the satellite will undergo an extensive series of tests at Industrieanlagen Betriebsgesellschaft mbH (IABG) to prove its readiness for space.

Details have emerged regarding the incident involving ESA’s Aeolus and one of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. SpaceX meanwhile blamed a “a bug in our on-call paging system” for its failure to co-ordinate evasive manoeuvres with ESA.

The Vikram Lander successfully separated from the Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter at 0745 UTC on 2 September 2019. Vikram is currently in a lunar orbit of 119 km x 127 km. The Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter continues to orbit the Moon in its existing orbit.