Satellite News

ISS-Reshetnev Company for the first time will manufacture a reflector for a European company as part of a commercial telecommunications satellite project.

On 27 February, the first six satellites of OneWeb’s constellation were successfully launched on a Soyuz rocket. These 6 satellites form part of a constellation to be made up initially by 648 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, possibly building up to over 900.

2Operate and GomSpace, together with Aarhus University, are working together within the MegaMan project, funded by Innovation Fund Denmark, to evaluate how existing telecom standards and existing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions developed for the terrestrial telecom sector can be leveraged to manage future satellite constellations robustly and efficiently.

Eutelsat Communications announced he successful mating of the platform and payload of the KONNECT satellite, conducted this week at Thales Alenia Space’s facilities in Cannes. This operation is a major step in the construction of the satellite, in preparation for its launch by the end of this year.

NASA has selected a new mission that will help scientists understand and, ultimately, forecast the vast space weather system around our planet. The new experiment will, for the first time, obtain global observations of an important driver of space weather in a dynamic region of Earth’s upper atmosphere that can cause interference with radio and GPS communications.

Northrop Grumman Corporation announced that the company successfully completed its 10th cargo supply mission to the International Space Station under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-1) contract.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has awarded Thales Alenia Space two contracts concerning the delivery of the Transponders and the Travelling Wave Tube Amplifiers for the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) and Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) missions.

A hiccup during boot-up recently interrupted NASA’s Curiosity rover’s planned activities and triggered a protective safe mode. The rover was brought out of this mode on 19 February and is otherwise operating normally, having successfully booted up over 30 times without further issues.