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The ShanghaiDaily.com online news website is reporting that the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, located in Sichuan Province in southwest China, will be the site of the nation’s first lunar satellite launch, set for October 26th. Named “Chang’e”, the satellite has been given the name of the Chinese goddess who flew to the moon.
Read MoreNewly assembled radar images from Cassini provide the best views of the hydrocarbon lakes and seas on Saturn's moon Titan. A new radar image reveals that Titan's south polar region also has lakes.
Read MoreSurrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) is to launch two new enhanced Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) satellites during the fourth quarter of 2008. Deimos-1, which was built for Deimos SL (Spain), and SSTL's UK-DMC2 will be launched by a Dnepr rocket from the new Kosmotras launch site in southern Ural. Both Demios-1 and UK-DMC2 will carry an enhanced version of the DMC wide area imaging system.
Read MoreOrbital Sciences Corporation [NYSE: ORB] has been selected by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to design, manufacture, integrate and test the Nuclear Spectroscopic Array (NuSTAR) scientific satellite. Plus, Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Orbital Boost Vehicle (OBV), which is the booster rocket for the Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI), was successfully launched as part of a test of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program.
Read MoreThe MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) probe to Mercury will use low-gain radio frequency antennas and other telecom systems to study various aspects of the planet. The probe’s Radio Science team has just completed a month of successful Doppler performance testing sims within an environment similar to what the probe will encounter in space.
Read MoreNASA's Dawn spacecraft initiated its 3 billion kilometer (1.7 billion mile) journey through the inner solar system on Thursday at 7:34 a.m. Eastern Time (4:34 a.m. Pacific Time). The mission is to study a pair of asteroids. The Delta 2 rocket, fitted with nine strap-on solid-fuel boosters, safely climbed away from the Florida coastline and launch complex 17B at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Read MoreFrom the Russian News & Information Agency (RIA Novosti) comes a report that the Foton-M bio-satellite’s re-entry module, launched from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan on September 14, has landed successfully approximately 105 miles away from Kostanai in northern Kazakhstan. All of the scheduled experiments were successfully carried out, according to Nikolai Sokolov, the flight director of the 12-day mission.
Read MoreThe H-IIA Launch Vehicle No. 13 (H-IIA F13) successfully lifted-off from the Tanegashima Space Center at 10:31 a.m. on September 14th (Japan Standard Time, JST) with the Lunar Orbit Explorer KAGUYA (SELENE) aboard. Separation of KAGUYA was confirmed at approximately 45 minutes and 34 seconds after the liftoff.
Read MoreScheduled to fly later this month is a European Space Agency (ESA) student project that will find a space tether performing a capsule deorbit maneuver. Parts of Africa, the Middle East, South America (below 55 degrees S), Antarctic Peninsula (above 82 degrees South), Eastern Russia and Western Alaska (above 170 degrees East) should find the tether visible.
Read MoreEn route to the Red Planet is the Mars Phoenix Lander. And we’ve learned today that SpaceDev (OTCBB:SPDV) provided key hardware and instruments for this endeavor that included five flight actuator assemblies, key components of the Wet Chemistry Laboratory for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA) instrument that’s aboard NASA’s craft, all via contract to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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