Satellite News

On 18 December 2019, Arianespace launched a Soyuz rocket carrying five satellites: Italy’s first second-generation COSMO-SkyMed radar observation satellite, CHEOPS, an ESA science mission to characterise exoplanets, and three smallsats, including ANGELS, the first nanosatellite built by French industry for an Internet of Things (IoT) mission. ANGELS recently celebrated its second anniversary in orbit and is fully operational, having already exceeded its initial design life.

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Berlin-based aerospace company PTS has been awarded a development contract by ArianeGroup to supply one of the core elements of the further development of the Ariane space program: the electronics and operating system for the ASTRIS Kick Stage.

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The test flight of an Angara A5 from Plesetsk cosmodrome has been postponed to 24 December from 23 December, two sources in the space rocket industry said according to Tass news agency.

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Rocket: Falcon 9; Payload: Dragon (CRS-24); Date: 21 December 2021, 1007 UTC; Launch site: Kennedy Space Center, USA. It was the 31st and final SpaceX launch of the year. CRS-24 also marked the 100th recovery of an orbital class rocket booster.

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A constellation of Southwest Research Institute-built and -operated satellites recently celebrated five years in orbit, circling the tropics to assess wind speeds to better understand how hurricanes intensify.

Mynaric has been selected to work on the architectural design of a next-generation optical communications terminal as part of the phase 0 of the Space Based Adaptive Communications Node (Space-BACN) programme of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

L3Harris Technologies completed the final major design milestone on the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) programme Phase IIb On-orbit Prototype Demonstration and has already begun building the demonstration satellite.

L3Harris Technologies has delivered its fourth imager to NASA, completing the series of advanced weather sensors for NOAA’s newest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) and lays the groundwork for future imager programmes.