News

Airbus has been awarded a €160 million contract for ESA’s FORUM satellite to help improve the accuracy of climate forecasts by measuring the heat emitted from Earth into space, Airbus said. The Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring (FORUM) mission will comprise the first satellite to observe Earth in the far-infrared range.

NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) CubeSat, designed to test a unique lunar orbit, successfully launched on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. The spacecraft acts as a pathfinder for Gateway, NASA’s lunar space station supporting the Artemis program.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) have selected three design concept proposals for a fission surface power system design to advance space nuclear technologies, NASA said. The design could launch by the end of the decade for a lunar demonstration. The contracts are valued at approximately US $5 million each and will fund the development of initial design concepts.

The developer, owner and operator of the Arnhem Space Centre (ASC), Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA), successfully completed Australia’s first commercial space launch on the Gove Peninsula in Australia’s Northern Territory, in cooperation with NASA, ELA reported. The BBIX rocket launch was NASA’s first launch from a fully commercial spaceport and the first of three rocket launches.

In this Space Café Radio -  SpaceWatch.Global publisher Torsten Kriening spoke with Prof. Dr. Frank Schaefer, Deputy director, head of business unit Space and head of system solutions department at Fraunhofer Ernst-Mach-Institute Freiburg/Germany, at the LEO Kinetic Space Safety Workshop in Lausanne about threats and risks in Low Earth Orbit and how to move forward to a sustainable future in space.

An innovative and practical tool to support space actors in more sustainable mission design and operations, the Space Sustainability Rating (SSR) hosted by the eSpace-EPFL Space Center, launched last Thursday. The SSR encourages, recognises, and rewards, space actors who enforce sustainable space missions with a unique rating system.

Launch vehicle company Isar Aerospace, has entered into a launch services agreement with space logistics company D-Orbit, to launch its ION Satellite Carrier to a Sun-synchronous orbit aboard Isar’s Spectrum rocket from Andøya, Isar said. Under the agreement, D-Orbit will become Isar’s primary customer from 2023.