Middle East

This Space Café WebTalk will feature Ran Livne, Director General of the Ramon Foundation, in conversation with Torsten Kriening, publisher of SpaceWatch.Global. A conversation about the upcoming Rakia mission. Ran has been the director-general of the Ramon Foundation since June 2015

The Sultanate of Oman, Virgin Orbit, small satellite manufacturer and operator SatRevolution, AI data analytics specialists TUATARA, and technology innovator ETCO, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on Oman’s first mission to deep space. The consortium will also deliver additional small satellites to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), including the first in Oman’s history.

Israel signed onto Artemis Accords to land astronauts on the Moon and establish a long-term human presence there as a base for future Mars missions, the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology announced. The Artemis program establishes principles of cooperation, sustainable human presence on the lunar surface and space exploration in general.

Former fighter jet pilot, Eytan Stibbe, is scheduled to become the second Israeli astronaut and the first to go to the International Space Station (ISS) in March this year. The Rakia mission will bring 35 scientific and technological experiments into space, based on their potential and possible economic impact.

Amid ongoing negotiations in Vienna over the country’s nuclear deal, Iran announced that it launched a Simorgh rocket with three research devices into space. It was not specified what the devices were or what they would be used for. Ahmad Hosseini, spokesperson for the Iranian Defense Ministry said that the devices were sent up to a 470 km altitude.

Chief Executives of leading satellite operators announced that the EMEA Satellite Operators Association (ESOA) is now going to include satellite operators from all over the world. To reflect this, the Association is changing its name to Global Satellite Operators’ Association (GSOA). 

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) appointed Salem Humaid Al Marri as the new Director-General of the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai, the agency said. Al Marri, 39, replaces Yousuf Al Shaibani, who served as the centre's Director-General since 2013. Al Marri was part of the team that set up the Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology in 2006

In this Space Café Radio – on tour on Mars (5), SpaceWatch.Global contributing editor Dr. Emma Gatti spoke in this fifth episode of our AMADEE-20 coverage with Dr. Robert Wild, Analog Astronaut. Together, they talked about AMADEE-20, the future of Mars exploration, space training and lessons learned from the mission.

ICEYE announced having signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on developing advanced SAR products. The collaboration builds on G42’s recent agreement with Yahsat to develop a geospatial data fusion of different sensor modalities. Finnish Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite and analytics provider, ICEYE

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live on Mars? AMADEE-20, a Mars-analogue mission born from the collaboration between the Austrian Space Forum, the Israeli Space Agency and another 25 countries tried to answer this question. From anxiety issues to crew rebellion, this is what they are trying to understand.