Satellite News

Thales Alenia Space in the UK achieved the major milestone of delivering its IMU Flight Models to Airbus Defence and Space in UK for integration with the ExoMars Rover.

CubeRover SARL and Luxembourg announced an agreement for the development of next-generation planetary rovers in Luxembourg.

NASA has awarded a contract extension to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to continue operations and science support for the agency’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Three new ideas have been chosen to compete as the tenth Earth Explorer mission. The decision follows the release of a call for ideas in September 2017.

DigitalGlobe, a Maxar company, announced that it has been awarded a contract valued at US$3.2 million by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to provide an unclassified environment with multi-source content for geospatial cloud analytics.

A pair of robot rovers have landed on an asteroid and begun a survey, Japan’s space agency JAXA said, as it conducts a mission aiming to shed light on the origins of the solar system. The rover mission marks the world’s first moving, robotic observation of an asteroid surface.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has commissioned Airbus for two studies for possible European involvement in the future human base in lunar orbit. The Gateway, previously known as the Deep Space Gateway (DSG) or Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G), is a project involving the US, Russian, Canadian, Japanese and European space agencies (NASA, Roskosmos, CSA, JAXA and ESA).

Russia’s navigation satellite GLONASS-M number 754 has been withdrawn from the orbital group, which now consists of 23 operational satellites.