For its eighth mission of 2016, and the year’s fifth Ariane 5 launch from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, Arianespace will orbit two satellites: Sky Muster™ II for the Australian operator nbn (National Broadband Network), and GSAT-18 for the Indian space agency ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization). Sky Muster™ II and GSAT-18 will be the 542nd and 543rd satellites to be launched by Arianespace. This Ariane 5 flight will be the 280th mission performed by the A...

A hot and dense mass of complex molecules, cocooning a newborn star, has been discovered by a Japanese team of astronomers using ALMA. This unique hot molecular core is the first of its kind to have been detected outside the Milky Way galaxy. It has a very different molecular composition from similar objects in our own galaxy - a tantalising hint that the chemistry taking place across the Universe could be much more diverse than expected. A team of Japanese researchers have used the power of...

The U.S. Air Force has awarded Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) $395 million in contract options for the production of the ninth and tenth Global Positioning System III (GPS III) satellite. GPS III satellites will deliver three times better accuracy, provide up to eight times improved anti-jamming capabilities and extend spacecraft life to 15 years, 25 percent longer than any GPS satellites on orbit today. GPS III's new L1C civil signal also will make it the first GPS satellite to be interoperable...

Harris Corporation's (NYSE:HRS) fourth Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) has completed a pre-ship review with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. The instrument now is complete and will be ready for future integration onto the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite - U Series (GOES-U) spacecraft, which is part of NOAA's next-generation weather satellite series. ABI is the world's most advanced geostationary weather instrument. It captures continuous im...

Spaceflight Industries, a next-generation space company enabling access to space and redefining global intelligence, announced the successful launch of its BlackSky Pathfinder-1 satellite into a sun synchronous orbit from India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). From Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, liftoff occurred on Sunday, Sept. 25, at 11:42 p.m. EDT, with the satellite separating from the rocket's upper stage at 1:57 a.m. EDT Monday. The Spaceflight Industries laun...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what may be water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. This finding bolsters other Hubble observations suggesting the icy moon erupts with high altitude water vapor plumes. The observation increases the possibility that missions to Europa may be able to sample Europa's ocean without having to drill through miles of ice. "Europa's ocean is considered to be one of the most promising places that could poten...

Airbus Defence and Space is continuing to future-proof its site at Friedrichshafen, Germany, with the construction of a new Integrated Technology Centre (ITC). At the heart of the four-storey centre with a basement and a footprint of around 4,200 m² will be a large central clean room for the development and construction of satellites. The building, with dimensions of around 70 x 60 metres and a height of over 20 metres, will be an expansion of the existing Hall 6 – the current sa...

Brief but powerful outbursts seen from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko during its most active period last year have been traced back to their origins on the surface. In the three months centred around the comet's closest approach to the Sun, on 13 August 2015, Rosetta's cameras captured 34 outbursts. These violent events were over and above regular jets and flows of material seen streaming from the comet's nucleus. The latter switch on and off with clockwork repeatability from one comet ro...

Two's company, but three might not always be a crowd - at least in space. Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and a trick of nature, have confirmed the existence of a planet orbiting two stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away towards the center of our galaxy. The planet orbits roughly 300 million miles from the stellar duo, about the distance from the asteroid belt to our sun. It completes an orbit around both stars roughly every seven years. The...

International teams of astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to explore the distant corner of the Universe first revealed in the iconic images of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). These new ALMA observations are significantly deeper and sharper than previous surveys at millimetre wavelengths. They clearly show how the rate of star formation in young galaxies is closely related to their total mass in stars. They also trace the previously unknown abundance...

Boeing [NYSE: BA] veteran Jim Chilton will succeed Craig R. Cooning as president of the company's Network & Space Systems (N&SS) businesses, effective Oct. 21. Chilton was vice president of the company's Strategic Missile & Defense Systems organization. Before that he spent much of his 32-year career leading space launch, payload processing and rocket engine programs. Cooning is retiring after 11 years at Boeing. "These businesses made significant operating improvements under Craig's leade...

LinQuest Corporation is proud to announce that the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) Advanced Systems and Development Directorate (AD) Ground Systems and Space Operations Division (ADG) at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, NM has awarded the Space Test and Engineering Contract 2014 (STEC14) contract to LinQuest, making this the first time the contract has been awarded to the incumbent contractor. The contract's scope includes engineering support and operations of one-of-a-kind researc...

An international team using ALMA, along with ESO's Very Large Telescope and other telescopes, has discovered the true nature of a rare object in the distant Universe called a Lyman-alpha Blob. Up to now astronomers did not understand what made these huge clouds of gas shine so brightly, but ALMA has now seen two galaxies at the heart of one of these objects and they are undergoing a frenzy of star formation that is lighting up their surroundings. These large galaxies are in turn at the centre of...

Pre-flight activities for Arianespace’s upcoming Ariane 5 mission are ramping up at the Spaceport in French Guiana, with launcher and payload preparations advancing in parallel for the October 4 liftoff. In a major milestone reached this month, Ariane 5 was rolled out from the Spaceport’s Launcher Integration Building – where its core cryogenic stage, two solid boosters and cryogenic upper stage were mated – to the Final Assembly Building. This process formally trans...

Delivering the most detailed images of the sun's lower atmosphere ever recorded from space, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), built and operated by Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) for NASA, has received more time to deliver groundbreaking space science. A recent $19.4 million contract extends Lockheed Martin's support for the orbiting observatory through September 2018, with a further extension possible through September 2019. "IRIS has taken more than 24 million images or spectra...

ViaSat Inc. (Nasdaq: VSAT), a global broadband services and technology company, today announced it was awarded a $33,291,975.00 cost-plus-incentive-fee contract for the Protected Tactical Service Field Demonstration (PTSFD), which will provide wideband anti-jam communications to tactical users across both government and commercial satellites. This program will include the development of a Protected Tactical Waveform (PTW) modem as well as an embedded cryptographic unit. The Protected Tactical Sy...

London, UK -  SMi Reports: SMi are excited to announce Harriett Baldwin, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, UK MoD will provide and opening ministerial address at Europe’s leading military communications event for satellite professionals.SMi Group are delighted to announce Harriett Baldwin, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, UK MoD has joined the 18th annual Global MilSatCom conference and exhibition, taking place in London, UK, on the 8th-10th November 2016, to provide the opening min...

Leidos (NYSE: LDOS) will support the Army Geospatial Center's (AGC) High-Resolution, 3-D (HR3D) Geospatial Information program through a prime contract from the General Services Administration (GSA). The single-award task order awarded under the GSA One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS) contract has a one-year base period of performance and includes four one-year options. If all options are exercised, the contract carries a total value of $777 million. Under the contract, t...

Arianespace launched a Vega rocket on a complex mission early this morning that demonstrated the flexibility of its upper stage and multisatellite carrier. In its first six flights, Vega delivered a wide range of satellites into very different orbits, demonstrating its flexibility. Liftoff of the seventh mission from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana came at 01:43 GMT on 16 September (03:43 CEST; 22:43 local time on 15 September). Four SkySat microsatellites for Terra Bella, w...

The mystery of a rare change in the behaviour of a supermassive black hole at the centre of a distant galaxy has been solved by an international team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope along with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. It seems that the black hole has fallen on hard times and is no longer being fed enough fuel to make its surroundings shine. Many galaxies are found to have an extremely bright core powered by a supermassive black ...