Satellite News

Arianespace has been awarded a launch contract by SITAEL, with the Italian Space Agency (ASI) as the final customer, to orbit PLATiNO 1 & 2 satellites, between 2022 and 2024 on Vega and Vega C. PLATiNO 1 and 2 are Earth observation small satellites operating on Sun-synchronous orbits. PLATiNO 1 will embark a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), operating in the X band, while PLATiNO 2 will carry an optical thermal instrument.

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Rocket: Falcon 9; Payload: 49 Starlink satellites (Starlink 4-5); Date: 6 January 2022, 2149 UTC; Launch site: Kennedy Space Center, USA. The satellites were deployed into 210 km × 339 km × 53.22 degrees transfer orbit 15 minutes after lift-off.

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Loft Orbital Solutions, Inc. and LeoStella, Inc. have extended their production agreement to secure multiple additional LEO-100 buses from LeoStella. These satellite buses are the latest in a series Loft Orbital has secured from LeoStella.

Security at key facilities of Baikonur’s spaceport has been tightened and the branches of Roskosmos’s enterprises are working as normal, the Russian state space corporation’s head, Dmitry Rogozin, said.

The European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) has chosen Arianespace to launch four new Galileo satellites for Europe’s own satellite navigation system. With this order, EUSPA takes over the role of placing launch services contracts for Galileo from ESA, which acted so far in the name and on behalf of the European Commission and will continue to be the technical authority for these launches.

Arianespace performed a total of 15 launches in 2021: three by Ariane 5, nine by Soyuz (including eight from the Russian spaceports in Baikonur and Vostochny for the OneWeb constellation) and three by Vega. A total of 305 satellites were launched. Out of the 15 launches, there were 11.5 for solely commercial customers, making Arianespace the leader in this market, according to the company.

The James Webb Space Telescope team has fully deployed the spacecraft’s 21-m sunshield, a key milestone in preparing it for science operations.

The inquiry commission looking into the failure of South Korea’s first Nuri rocket has identified a design flaw as the root cause for the launcher’s failure to enter orbit.