Satellite News

JAXA said it plans to cancel its long-delayed Lunar-A moon mission, which originally was to lift off in 1995.

Lockheed Martin has received a US$36.5 million contract from Inmarsat to develop technology that will enable Inmarsat to expand its market reach into the commercial handheld mobile satellite service market.

A team of engineers from Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and NASA have successfully met the criteria needed to demonstrate Technology Readiness Level 6 (TRL-6) for the Wavefront Sensing and Control for the James Webb Space Telescope, a measure used by NASA to assess the maturity of evolving technologies.

The Panchromatic camera (PAN) on board ISRO’s latest remote sensing satellite, Cartosat 2, was switched on today through a series of commands issued from the Spacecraft Control Centre of ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) at Bangalore.

China Meteorological Administration (CMA) received the first set of images from the recently launched weather satellite Fengyun-2D (FY-2D) on Friday afternoon.

All four satellites put in orbit by India’s PSLV-C7 “are very healthy,” officials at the Vikaram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) said.

State-controlled Argentinian satellite operator Ar-Sat and applied research institute INVAP last month entered into an agreement under which INVAP will build three communication satellites until 2017 for the equivalent of about EUR126.7 million/US$163.4 million.

On its way to Pluto, New Horizons has begun collecting data on the Jovian system this week, starting with black-and-white images of Jupiter and an infrared look at its icy moon Callisto on 8 January.