While the joint NASA/DLR mission, GRACE (Gravity-Recovery And Climate Experiment) has been a resounding success since its 2002 launch, a follow on mission called, rather unimaginatively, GRACE Follow-On, is now being planned. To that end Astrium of Germany (part of EADS) has now been awarded the construction contract in November by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory – the centre managing the mission. The launch of the spacecraft is to take place in August 2017. The spacecraft, weighing in at 590kg each at launch, willl be equipped with a laser ranging system and will have a minimum design life of five years,
Astrium gets order for Grace Follow-On spacecraft
About Seradata
Seradata produce the renowned SpaceTrak Launch & Satellite Database. Trusted by 100 of the world’s leading Space organisations, SpaceTrak is a fully queryable database used for market analysis, failure/risk assessment, spectrum analysis and space situational awareness (SSA).
For more information go to www.seradata.com/spacetrak
Related Articles
Every August – the silly season when hard news is hard to come by – this column does its bit Read more
NASA has announced that its Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will join the SPHEREx satellite on Read more
NASA successfully launched an Atlas V N22 rocket, carrying Starliner OFT-2, from Cape Canaveral, USA, at 2254 GMT on 19 Read more
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 with the first privately crewed mission to the ISS from the Kennedy Space Centre, USA, Read more
On 21 December, NASA and SpaceX successfully launched the Dragon CRS-24 (Commercial Resupply Services-24) spacecraft at 1007 GMT using a Read more
On 8 November 2021 at 1905 GMT, Crew Dragon - NASA Crew 2 Endeavour autonomously undocked from the IDA-3 /PMA-3 Read more
Blue Origin conducted its New Shepard-17 (NS-17) suborbital mission carrying 18 experiments for commercial and institutional customers inside the capsule. Read more
Blue Origin’s disagreement with NASA over its failure to win a contract for the Human Landing System (HLS) finally reached Read more