SAN FRANCISCO – EchoStar Corp. announced another delay in the launch of its Jupiter-3 communications satellite and the failure of two nanosatellites to reach their intended orbits, during a Feb. 23 quarterly earnings call.

WASHINGTON — The leaders of the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on strategic forces during a hearing Feb. 23 called on the Defense Department and other agencies to more openly discuss the threats posed by China and Russia as these nations advance their space and nuclear weapons technologies.

WASHINGTON — A Falcon 9 booster failed to land after its most recent launch Feb. 15 because of “heat damage” it sustained, but a SpaceX official said he was confident that the boosters can be reused 10 or more times.

 NASA marked another milestone last week with the successful landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars. Perseverance is now the fifth and most technologically advanced rover to reach the surface of the red planet.

Following the selection of three Earth Explorer candidate missions to enter a first feasibility study in September 2018, ESA has chosen one of the candidates, Harmony, to move to the next phase of development. Harmony is envisaged as a mission with two satellites that orbit in formation with one of the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites to address key scientific questions related to ocean, ice and land dynamics.

WASHINGTON – Scott Soenen, who held key engineering jobs at Capella Space and Planet, is the new chief technology officer of Hydrosat, a data analytics company building a satellite constellation to produce a global thermal infrared map.

“If you are looking for the one person that has engineered successful remote sensing data platforms across three high-growth commercial satellite operators, Scott is that person,” Hydrosat CEO Pieter Fossel said in a statement.

SAN FRANCISCO – Redwire has acquired Deployable Space Systems (DSS) Inc., the rapidly growing Goleta, California, company that manufactures various structures and mechanisms including the Roll-Out Solar Array (ROSA). Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The DSS acquisition announced Feb.

WASHINGTON — L3Harris Technologies announced Feb. 23 it has received a $136 million contract from Lockheed Martin for four digital payloads for GPS navigation satellites. 

The navigation payload mission data units are for the next-generation GPS satellites known as GPS 3 Follow-on or GPS 3F, made by Lockheed Martin.

HELSINKI — India has revised target dates for launches of its human spaceflight missions and the Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing following COVID-19-related delays.

Using a 25-year record of satellite observations over the Getz region in West Antarctica, scientists have discovered that the pace at which glaciers flow towards the ocean is accelerating. This new research, which includes data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission and ESA’s CryoSat mission, will help determine if these glaciers could collapse in the next few decades and how this would affect future global sea-level rise.