ESA’s mission to Mars in 2016 has entered the final stage of construction with the signature of a contract today with Thales Alenia Space at the Paris Air & Space Show. ExoMars will fly two missions, in 2016 and 2018, in a partnership between ESA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. Its main goal is to answer one of the outstanding scientific questions of our time: has life ever existed on Mars? In addition, ExoMars will develop new European technical capabilities in lan...

PALO ALTO, Calif. -  The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spacecraft is on track for a launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on June 26. IRIS will fill a crucial gap in the ability of scientists to advance Sun-Earth connection studies by tracing the flow of energy and plasma through a dynamic interface region – the chromosphere and transition region – between the solar surface and the solar corona. “The entire IRIS team is enormously pleased that we’ve reached...

HERNDON, Va. -  ITT Exelis (NYSE: XLS) has been awarded a $42 million contract by Aireon LLC to provide the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B)data processing and distribution component for its global space-based air traffic surveillance system. Aireon, a joint venture between Iridium Communications Inc. and NAV CANADA, will take advantage of the hosted payload space on Iridium NEXT, Iridium’s second-generation satellite constellation, to enable fully global and continuous space-base...

With the exhaustion of its helium coolant, Herschel’s science mission ended on 29 April. But the stalwart satellite continued providing value to the end, serving as an orbiting testbed for control techniques that can’t normally be tested in flight. Mission controllers sent the final command to the Herschel satellite today at 12:25 GMT (14:25 CEST), marking the end of operations for ESA’s hugely successful space observatory. Herschel’s science mission had alread...

LE BOURGET, France -  Two major figures in the European space industry on Monday backed plans to modify the Ariane 5 rocket to help it shoot larger satellites into orbit. The head of the European Space Agency, Jean-Jacques Dordain, said he would ask ESA member states for fast-track approval to have the modification carried out by the end of 2015. "The proposal has been made, and this week or next week we will be discussing at the next (ESA) Launchers Programme Board," he told a press conference a...