News

China's Institute of Aerospace Information Research has helped ten countries install virtual ground stations in order to receive remote sensing data, it was announced last week.

Earlier this month, the Royal Air Force (RAF) took part in the gruelling Himalayan Venture 18, the principal expedition of RAF100 –the celebration of the centenary of the formation of the Royal Air Force, the first independent Air Force in the world. Uniting 75 members of the wider RAF family, the pioneering expedition took teams to the Rolwaling and Khumbu regions of the Nepalese Himalayan range.

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the Indian state-run telecommunications company, is partnering with Japan’s Softbank and NTT Communications to provide 5G networks and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity across India, including through Softbank’s OneWeb satellite constellation that is currently under construction.

Arianespace is preparing its sixth launch of 2018 as it plans to orbit Azerbaijan's Azerspace-2/Intelsat-38 telecommunications satellite on board an Ariane-5 launch vehicle from the Guiana Space Center (CSG) in South America. The launch, planned for 25 September 2018, also includes the Horizons-3e communications satellite for Intelsat and its partner SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation.

The governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are considering the joint construction and operation of a communications satellite, and are also looking at proposing a Central Asian Earth observation satellite constellation consisting of five satellites.

e-GEOS, a company jointly owned by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and Telespazio, has won new contracts in Indonesia and Japan to provide satellite imagery and geospatial intelligence from the COSMO-SkyMed Earth observation satellite constellation for maritime domain awareness and other applications.

Thai New Space company mu Space released on 21 September 2018 a 3D image of the spacesuit that astronauts and mu Space's space tourism clients will one day wear when they travel in space and on the Moon.

Planet, the New Space commercial Earth observation company that operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites, and Orbital Insight, a leading company specialising in geospatial analytics, announced on 19 September 2018 a multi-year contract for Orbital Insight to source daily, global satellite imagery from Planet. The contract is an expansion of their previous imagery-sharing agreement.

Azerbaijan's national space agency, AzerCosmos, will soon start selling satellite imagery taken by its AzerSky Earth observation satellite, as well as imagery taken by the Pléiades-1A and 1B satellites, according to a source in AzerCosmos reported by Azerbaijani news outlet Trend.

Kleos Space, the Luxembourg-based New Space geolocation company that is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), has selected Rocket Lab to launch its first satellites in 2019.