Satellite News

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. has signed a contract for C$2.8 million (EUR2.0 million, US$2.6 million) with the Canadian Department of National Defence to conduct the Definition Phase for project Polar Epsilon.

NASA confirmed earlier reports that it is examining the possibility of adding a lightweight grapple fixture to the James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in 2013.

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has successfully completed the critical milestone of bonding the Schmidt Corrector optic to its mounting ring for the Kepler Mission. Ball anticipates delivery of all Kepler optics by late-June.

TerreStar Networks Inc., a majority owned subsidiary of Motient Corporation (MNCP), announced that they have been notified by Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) that delivery of its satellite, TerreStar-1, is expected to be August 2008.

A Russian Soyuz FG with Fregat upper stage is to launch four Globalstar satellites later today. Lift-off is scheduled for 2031 UTC, and the whole mission is expected to last 1 hour, 42 minutes [too late for this issue].

SpaceDev announced that it successfully completed assembly, test and delivery of an Antenna Pointing Assembly (APA), for the ground link antenna pointing gimbal for the GeoEye-1 satellite, currently being built by General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems.

Canada’s National Research Council Institute for Aerospace Research (NRC Aerospace) has successfully completed an acoustic qualification test on Radarsat-2.

ITT Corporation has delivered the Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) Structural Thermal Model (STM) focal-plane detector packaging under subcontract to Teledyne Scientific and Imaging, which then delivered it to NASA for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).