The Czech Space Office (CSO) is the central contact point for the coordination of pure space science related activities in the Czech Republic.

It fulfils tasks of the national information and advisory centre for the academia on opportunities to enter the international space scene and on space activities in the Czech Republic. It is a non-profit association created in November 2003. The bodies of the association are the Management Board, the Supervisory Board and the Managing Director.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a planned space telescope for NASA's Explorer program, designed to search for extrasolar planets using the transit method.

The project is led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with seed funding from Google. In 2013 NASA announced that TESS had been selected for launch in 2017. TESS will be located on an High Earth orbit.

Mission concept

Once launched, the telescope would conduct a two-year all-sky survey program for exploring transiting exoplanets around nearby and bright stars. TESS would be equipped with four wide-angle telescopes and charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors, with a total size of 67 megapixels. Science data, which are pixel subarrays around each of up to 10,000 target stars per field, are transmitted to Earth every two weeks for further analysis. Full-frame images with an effective exposure time of two hours are transmitted to the ground as well, enabling astrophysicists to search the data for an unexpected, transient phenomenon, such as the optical counterpart to a gamma-ray burst.

Sentinel is a multi-satellite project to be launched from 2014, being developed by ESA under the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) program, renamed as Copernicus program. The Sentinel missions include satellites radar and super-spectral imaging for land, ocean and atmospheric monitoring.

The Sentinel satellite familiy is designed to replace the ENVISAT mission.

Missions

The Sentinel missions will have the following objectives:

• Sentinel 1 will provide all-weather, day and night radar imaging for land and ocean services. The first Sentinel-1 satellite is planned for launch in 2014.
• Sentinel 2 will provide high-resolution optical imaging for land services (e.g. imagery of vegetation, soil and water cover, inland waterways and coastal areas). Sentinel-2 will also provide information for emergency services. The first Sentinel-2 satellite is planned for launch in 2014.
• Sentinel 3 will provide ocean and global land monitoring services. The first Sentinel-3 satellite is planned for launch in 2017.
• Sentinel 4, embarked as a payload upon a Meteosat Third Generation Satellite, will provide data for atmospheric composition monitoring. It will be launched in 2019.
• Sentinel 5 Precursor - subset of the Sentinel 5 sensor set planned for launch in 2015. The primary purpose of this was to provide overlapping data (especially SCIAMACHY atmospheric observations) with the aging ENVISAT. However contact with ENVISAT was lost in April 2012 and the mission was declared ended in May 2012. It is unknown whether Sentinel 5 Precursor will be rescheduled as a result.
• Sentinel 5 will also provide data for atmospheric composition monitoring. It will be embarked on a post-EUMETSAT Polar System (EPS) spacecraft and launched in 2020.
• Sentinel 6 is the intent to sustain high precision altimetry missions following the Jason-2 satellite.

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER) is an American robotic space mission involving two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, exploring the planet Mars.

It began in 2003 with the sending of the two rovers—MER-A Spirit and MER-B Opportunity—to explore the Martian surface and geology.The mission's scientific objective was to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, which includes three previous successful landers: the two Viking program landers in 1976 and Mars Pathfinder probe in 1997.

In July 2007, during the fourth mission extension, Martian dust storms blocked sunlight to the rovers and threatened the ability of the craft to gather energy through their solar panels, causing engineers to fear that one or both of them might be permanently disabled. However, the dust storms lifted, allowing them to resume operations.

On May 1, 2009, during its fifth mission extension, Spirit became stuck in soft soil on Mars.[5] After nearly nine months of attempts to get the rover back on track, including using test rovers on Earth, NASA announced on January 26, 2010 that Spirit was being retasked as a stationary science platform. This mode would enable Spirit to assist scientists in ways that a mobile platform could not, such as detecting "wobbles" in the planet's rotation that would indicate a liquid core.[6] Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) lost contact with Spirit after last hearing from the rover on March 22, 2010 and continued attempts to regain communications lasted until May 25, 2011, bringing the elapsed mission time to 6 years 2 months 19 days, or over 25 times the original planned mission duration.

In recognition of the vast amount of scientific information amassed by both rovers, two asteroids have been named in their honor: 37452 Spirit and 39382 Opportunity. The mission is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which designed, built, and is operating the rovers.

Spirit, MER-A (Mars Exploration Rover – A), is a robotic rover on Mars, active from 2004 to 2010.

It was one of two rovers of NASA's ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It landed successfully on Mars at 04:35 Ground UTC on January 4, 2004, three weeks before its twin, Opportunity (MER-B), landed on the other side of the planet. Its name was chosen through a NASA-sponsored student essay competition. The rover became stuck in late 2009, and its last communication with Earth was sent on March 22, 2010.

The rover completed its planned 90-sol mission. Aided by cleaning events that resulted in higher power from its solar panels, Spirit went on to function effectively over twenty times longer than NASA planners expected. Spirit also logged 7.73 km (4.8 mi) of driving instead of the planned 600 m (0.4 mi), allowing more extensive geological analysis of Martian rocks and planetary surface features. Initial scientific results from the first phase of the mission (the 90-sol prime mission) were published in a special issue of the journal Science.

Opportunity, MER-B (Mars Exploration Rover – B), is a robotic rover active on the planet Mars since 2004.

Launched on July 7, 2003, Opportunity landed on Mars' Meridiani Planum on January 25, 2004, three weeks after its twin Spirit (MER-A), also part of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission, touched down on the other side of the planet. While Spirit became immobile in 2009 and ceased communications in 2010, Opportunity remains active as of 2013, having already exceeded its planned 90 sol (Martian days) duration of activity by 9 years, 215 days (in Earth time). Opportunity has continued to move, gather scientific observations, and report back to Earth for over 38 times its designed lifespan.

Mission highlights include the initial 90 sol mission, finding extramartian meteorites such as Meridiani Planum, and over two years studying Victoria crater. It survived dust-storms and reached Endeavour crater in 2011, which has been described as a "second landing site".

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C..

The Venus Spectral Rocket (VeSpR) is a two-stage system, combining a Terrier missile - originally built as a surface-to-air missile and later re-purposed to support science missions - and a Black Brant model Mk1 sounding rocket with a telescope inside. Integration took place at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

The VeSpR missions is  to probe the atmosphere of Venus. It will study Venus atmospheric loss. VeSpR will peek at Venus from above Earth's absorbing atmosphere.

The experiments will look at ultraviolet (UV) light that is being emitted from Venus' atmosphere, which can provide information about the history of the planet's water. Measurements like these cannot be done using Earth-based telescopes because our atmosphere absorbs most UV light before it reaches the ground.

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European Launch Vehicle (ELV) is an Italian company established by Avio and ASI (Italian Space Agency) in December 2000.

It was selected by ESA, the European Space Agency, to serve as prime contractor in the activities geared to the development of the European launcher, called Vega, and other small launchers with all associated technologies. The company is responsible for every aspect of system development, from the drafting of the specifications, through production, to its integration in the launch pad. Elv's primary tasks include managing and planning launcher design, development, qualification and production processes, by coordinating the activities of the subcontracts participating in the programme. Moreover, ELV coordinates and ensures the integration of the launcher in the lift-off facilities and participates with a team in the final stage of the launch.

At present (Nov. 2013) ELV is owned 70% by Avio SpA and 30% by ASI. Headquartered in Rome, it has an operational facility in Colleferro (Rome, Italy), where Avio has its main aerospace operations: one of the most dynamically innovative production centres, at the forefront of science and technology.

The NEE-02 KRYSAOR is a PEGASUS class satelliite, of the Ecuadorian Civilian Space Agency (EXA),  which means that is a twin of the original NEE-01 PEGASUS.

The NEE-02 will be launched in to a 98.7 degree inclination, helio synchronous orbit, 720km perigee and 890km apogee on November 21, 2013

Its mission is the same as PEGASUS, serving education and also acting as orbital sentinels watching for possible threats from small NEOs in last phase of atmospheric entry and helping to catalog orbital debris. Also it has the latest advances in active deployment of its solar arrays, high speed digital transmission and a higher resolution video camera.

NEE-01 Pegasus was an Ecuadorian technology demonstration satellite, and Ecuador's first satellite to be launched to space. Built by the Ecuadorian Civilian Space Agency (EXA), it was a nanosatellite of the single-unit CubeSat class. The spacecraft's instruments included a dual visible and infrared camera which allowed the spacecraft to take pictures and transmit live video from space. The satellite operated normally until 23 May 2013 at approximately 05:38 UTC, Pegaso passed very close to the spent upper stage of a 1985 Tsyklon-3 rocket over the Indian Ocean. While there was no direct collision between the satellite and upper stage, Pegaso is believed to have suffered a "glancing blow" after passing through a debris cloud around the Tsyklon stage and striking one of the small pieces. After the incident, the satellite was found to be "spinning wildly over two of its axes" and unable to communicate with its ground station. While efforts were made to reestablish control of Pegaso, on 28 August 2013 the decision was made by EXA and the Ecuadorian government to declare the satellite as lost.