Satellite News

COM DEV International Ltd. announced that it has received an Authorisation to Proceed (ATP) from Alcatel Alenia Space to provide advanced payload electronics for the Globalstar-2 satellite constellation.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft successfully completed a flyby of Jupiter, using the massive planet’s gravity to pick up speed for its 4.8-billion km voyage to Pluto and the unexplored Kuiper Belt region beyond.

ESA’s Mars Express and Venus Express missions will continue to operate until early-May 2009. The decision was unanimously taken by ESA’s Science Programme Committee last Friday.

SpaceDev announced that its subsidiary, Starsys, Inc., has been awarded a US$1.4 million cost reimbursable design and development subcontract with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in support of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission.

The initial problems with the U.S. Air Force’s TacSat-2 microsatellite, launched in December 2006, had two main causes.

ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft executed a close flyby of Mars on 25 February, a key milestone in the 7.1-thousand-million km journey to its target comet.

Astrium is set to build the Mercury probe BepiColombo on behalf of the European Space Agency, ESA. ESA’s scientific programme decision-making body, the Science Programme Committee (SPC), agreed to award this order to Astrium following the decision of ESA’s Industrial Policy Committee in January this year.

Solar Orbiter and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) have experienced cost overruns that have led ESA to “shuffle” the missions and look for partnerships, the agency said in a heavily sugar-coated statement.