Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman today has two Mission Extension Vehicles in orbit providing station-keeping services for two Intelsat geostationary satellites that were running low on fuel.

The company meanwhile is preparing to launch a new servicing vehicle equipped with a robotic arm that will install propulsion jet packs on dying satellites.

WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab will launch an Astroscale mission to rendezvous with a spent rocket stage in low Earth orbit, a prelude to eventually deorbiting the stage.

Rocket Lab announced Sept. 21 that it won a contract from Astroscale for the launch of its Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan (ADRAS-J) spacecraft. A Rocket Lab Electron will launch ADRAS-J from its Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand in 2023.

ADRAS-J will rendezvous with and inspect an upper stage left in orbit by a Japanese launch. The Japanese space agency JAXA awarded Tokyo-based Astroscale a contract in 2020 for the mission as part of its two-phase Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration project. The second phase, which will involve an attempt to deorbit the upper stage, has not yet been competed by JAXA.

The launch of the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) observatory is now targeting December 13 2021, onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The IXPE X-Ray observatory is the latest spacecraft in NASA’s historic Small Explorers (SMEX) program.

The IXPE mission was first selected as a part of the Explorers program in January 2017. NASA awarded the IXPE team $188 million for the spacecraft and mission, including the cost of the launch vehicle, post-launch operations, and data analysis. The spacecraft will be used to study Black Holes and other cosmic X-ray mysteries.

Built by Ball Aerospace at facilities in Boulder, Colorado, the IXPE spacecraft is based on the Ball Configurable Platform (BCP)-100 satellite bus. The BCP-100 is one of Ball Aerospace’s offerings for a modular satellite bus for low-Earth orbit (LEO) operations. It was most recently used by NASA’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM) to test a new type of Green propellant for space operations.

Africa’s space industry has been slow to take off, but it’s predicted to skyrocket in the next few years.

Since the continent’s first satellite launched more than 20 years ago, 44 have been sent into orbit by 13 African countries, according to consultancy Space in Africa. It says a further 125 are being developed by 23 countries, all expected to launch before 2025.

The payoff could be substantial. A 2021 report by the World Economic Forum estimates that data collected from space could unlock $2 billion a year in benefits for Africa.

Alphabet’s floating internet venture Project Loon may have been deflated, but its legacy looks set to live on through a new effort called Project Taara. The team has salvaged the technology to deliver internet connectivity with lasers, demonstrating the viability in a new test between two cities separated by the Congo River.

Originally a Google side hustle before being spun off into its own project by parent company Alphabet, Project Loon had lofty goals of connecting remote regions to the internet by beaming lasers between high-altitude balloons. After years of successful trials however, the project was eventually grounded in January 2021 due to sky-high costs.

The balloons may have been a bust, but there’s still life in the lasers. After all, wireless optical communication systems could help connect communities where it’s not feasible to build complex grids of underground optical fiber cables, and where cellular or satellite internet is patchy or expensive.

Internet on Mars!!

Elon Musk’s ‘Starlink’ is currently providing services in parts of the US and Canada and has plans to enter India by the end of 2021. Tech mogul Elon Musk, via his recent tweet, revealed that his satellite broadband company ‘Starlink’ will extend its services to Mars. Musk informed about this idea while replying to a user’s tweet last week, as per reports by The Science Times. Currently, the broadband internet provider is undergoing public beta testing in parts of the US and Canada.

Starlink will strengthen Starship’s communication Musk’s idea came to light when a user asked if Starlink will be deployed between Earth and Mars to strengthen communication for Starship is SpaceX’s ambitious project that is being touted as the vehicle that will ferry cargo and crew to the red planet and back in the coming years. In response to the user’s tweet, Musk amplified the excitement with one word, “yeah”.

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WASHINGTON — The ground stations and tracking antennas the U.S. military relies on to communicate with its satellites — known as the Satellite Control Network, or SCN — are decades old and short of the capacity needed to keep up with the projected growth in space activities.

There are seven SCN sites located in the United States and around the world. About 15 large dish antennas at these sites command more than 190 military and government satellites in multiple orbits.

“Certainly the Satellite Control Network is a venerable system that’s been around for a long time. So we have multiple efforts ongoing to ensure that it’s ready for the future that we now find ourselves in,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Operations Command, said last month at the 36th Space Symposium.

SpaceX’s satellite internet service is apparently preparing to enter its next phase.

Researchers recently found that a few years back, they “slept” through a hurricane. On analyzing weather satellite data from 2,014 scientists discovered evidence of a hurricane from space that pushed plasma toward Earth’s upper atmosphere. Though these events are invisible to the eye, the evidence reveals that they’re not uncommon. Understanding more about them could help to protect satellite and communications systems from disturbance and preserve radar and GPS output for life below on the planet’s surface.

Satellites in orbit around the planet gather immense amounts of data on environmental and climate activity. A recent publication in Nature Communications explains how the first hurricane from space was discovered through analysis of data gathered back in August 2014.

The research team looked at recently released files containing measurements taken by four satellites in the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. From their analysis, the scientists created a 3D image that showed the hurricane from space forming features similar to what we’re familiar with in Earth’s lower atmosphere. A press release in Science Daily describes it as a gigantic spiral of plasma, with its arms swirling counterclockwise above the North Pole.