Satellite News

ComSpOC signed a data provider agreement last week with Thoth Technology, operators of the Algonquin Radio Observatory (ARO), to formalise efforts to advance the state of radar tracking of Geostationary (GEO) satellites and debris.

A new Blagovest heavy-class communications satellite is being developed by Russia’s Information Satellite Systems – Reshetnev, the company said.

The navigation satellite set to become the 16th in the Galileo constellation has been taken through a Europe-wide rehearsal for its launch and early operations in space.

Objects in space will soon be monitored by a radar array for the U.S. Air Force’s Space Fence as part of Lockheed Martin’s new test site representative of the larger system under construction on the remote Kwajalein Island.

The ultra-sensitive, highly precise Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope beat its most stringent requirements during Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) testing, which is now complete.

NASA’s newest space weather research satellite, the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, is on course for a summer 2017 launch after UC Berkeley scientists and their colleagues shipped its four instruments to Utah for testing, prior to being packed into the final satellite.

Built for ESA by GomSpace in Denmark, the GomX-3 CubeSat was ejected from the International Space Station on 5 October 2015, along with a Danish student satellite. Since its launch, it has been tracking aircraft in flight across the entire globe.

Airbus Defence and Space has signed a contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to build its next Earth Explorer mission, the Biomass satellite. Biomass is due to launch in 2021 and will measure forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes for five years.