When did the first stars and galaxies form in the universe? How brightly did they burn their nuclear fuel? Scientists will seek to gain answers to these questions with the launch of the Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRIment (CIBER) on a Black Brant XII suborbital sounding rocket between 11 and 11:59 p.m. EDT, June 4 from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Jamie Bock, CIBER principal investigator from the California Institute of Technology, said, “The first massive stars to...

Soyuz Flight VS05 Preparations for Arianespace’s next Soyuz flight are in full swing at multiple locations across the Spaceport, including the start-up of satellite installation in the S5 payload preparation center, and initiation of launcher build-up within the ELS launch site’s MIK integration building. At the Spaceport’s main base area, the first of four O3b Networks satellites to be orbited on the June 24 mission is now mounted on the payload dispenser for Soyuz....

ARLINGTON, Va. -  ATK (NYSE: ATK), the nation's largest rocket motor producer, has successfully completed the first U.S.-based testing of the High Performance Green Propulsion (HPGP) thruster technology for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The testing was conducted at ATK Defense Group's test facility in Elkton, Md., in April 2013. The ATK test facility is capable of assessing high-fidelity performance and operability features of the HPGP thruster technology, which is intended to be use...

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. -  Boeing [NYSE: BA] is progressing with the expansion of the U.S Defense Department's highest capacity communications satellite constellation, recently shipping its sixth Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) satellite, pictured here in the company's El Segundo facility, for a scheduled launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., later this year. Through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Air Force on WGS-6, the Australian Defence Force will have global access to the WGS on-orbit constellation. ...

Earth watcher Proba-V is in good health following its launch last week. The Vegetation imager has been switched on and the first image has been captured over western France. The miniature satellite is designed to map land cover and vegetation growth across the entire planet every two days. The data can be used for alerting authorities to crop failures or monitoring the spread of deserts and deforestation. The satellite’s vegetation imager was switched on Wednesday in time to get...