ESA has selected Airbus UK, Stevenage, to lead the FORUM construction project, according to an announcement on 28 June. The Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring (FORUM) satellite is an ESA Earth Explorer mission that aims to help understanding...
Rocket Lab successfully launched an Electron rocket from Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand, at 0955 GMT on 28 June, to an initial low Earth parking orbit. The Electron was carrying CAPSTONE (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation...
Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency and conglomerate, has taken what is thought to be the illegal step of unilaterally ordering the switching on of a spacecraft instrument it does not own. The German Max Planck Institute ordered its eRosita instrument on Russia’s Spektr...
NASA has reported that a micrometeoroid strike has caused some damage to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The largest of five meteoroid strikes since its December 2021 launch occurred between 23 and 25 May, causing damage to one segment (segment C3) of its 6 m...
As part of its planetary defence strategy, China plans to launch an asteroid impactor mission to deflect the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid. The test mission, as reported by SpaceNews (Andrew Jones), will make close-up observations of a selected, potentially...
SpaceX has admitted a new blow to its Starlink low Earth orbit-based communications satellite constellation. There were already doubts about the reliability of the Starlink V1.0 satellites (about a quarter of the 60 satellites on a Falcon 9 launch in March last year...
