Satellite News

ITT Corporation was one of two successful bidders for a contract from the GPS Wing of the U.S. Air Force to begin development of a Modernised Space Receiver (MSR).

China is still working on its own satellite navigation system, Beidou (”Compass”). It will eventually comprise five satellites in GEO and 30 in MEO, Xinhua news agency reports. This is a change to an earlier approach that in essence envisioned a mainly regional instead of the now — apparently — planned global system.

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. has signed a strategic long term agreement with Rocketplane Kistler to participate in the initial and future phases of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) programme.

Launch preparation is well underway in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, for the launch of Badr-4, a Eurostar E2000+ satellite built by Astrium for the Arab Satellite Communications Organisation (Arabsat).

JAXA’s Hinode (formerly Solar-B) satellite has reported its first observations of the Sun with its suite of scientific instruments.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has given the green light for a fifth servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Servicing Mission 4 (SM-4) is to extend and improve the observatory’s capabilities through 2013.

NASA selected concept studies for missions that would return a sample of an asteroid, probe the chemistry of Venus’ atmosphere and reveal the interior structure and history of the Earth’s moon. Also selected for further study are three missions of opportunity that would make new use of two NASA spacecraft that have completed their primary objectives.

Work on the International Space Station returned to normal after a docking problem with the Russian Progress M-58 cargo ship was resolved. According to Russian Space Agency spokesman Igor Panarin, “the parameters of the orbit, the parameters of the atmosphere and the state of on-board systems in the Russian ISS segment are back to normal.”