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...
After a painstaking operation during its four weeks post-launch, engineers at NASA confirmed that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) had all its key pieces (sun shield, secondary and primary mirrors etc) properly deployed, erected and locked into place. However,...
Sentinel-1B, a key Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite of the ESA/EU Copernicus Earth observation and monitoring programme, has failed in orbit. On 23 December, its C-band SAR Interferometric radar mission for environmental monitoring was shut down after a power...
European launch provider Arianespace successfully launched an Ariane 5 ECA vehicle from Kourou Space Centre, French Guiana, at 1220 GMT on 25 December carrying the 6.2 metric ton James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The JWST was starting its 29-day transfer to the L2...
The Guildford UK-based satellite construction firm SSTL (Surrey Satellite Technology Limited), which is part of Airbus Space and Defence, has won a contract from UK-based Satellite Vu for the first satellite in its seven satellite constellation of infra red heat...
