ESA’s Mars Express has captured the rare moment of Mars’ small moon Deimos passing in front of Jupiter and its four largest moons ­– the focus of ESA’s upcoming Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer launching next year. Celestial alignments like these enable a more precise determination of the martian moons’ orbits.

Following its unanimous approval by ESA Council on 17 March, the Association Agreement between ESA and the Slovak Republic was signed on 14 June at ESA ESTEC in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.

Menlo Park CA (SPX) Oct 13, 2022
Airbus Ventures announces its newest lead investment in Solestial, Inc. ("Solestial"), the solar energy company for space. The round was joined by AEI HorizonX, GPVC, Stellar Ventures, Industrious Ventures, and others. This new funding will be used to ramp up production and customer engagement capabilities, as the company expands ground and flight testing in parallel; additional investments in R

Leiden, Netherlands (SPX) Oct 13, 2022
An additional six of Airbus' Sparkwing solar panels have been selected by Aerospacelab to accommodate their ramp up towards higher satellite production volumes. The panels are designed and produced at Airbus' Dutch site in Leiden. The ordered configuration, consisting of two single panel wings, each measuring 1070x570mm, is identical to the set recently delivered by Airbus for the first flight m

McLean VA (SPX) Oct 13, 2022
SpaceLink, a company that provides secure data relay from any orbit, any time, announced it was awarded a contract by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to study how commercial optical ground terminals will integrate into the Near Space Network. The funded study includes a demonstration of end-to-end transport of multi-source data at the SpaceLink gateway in the Mojave Desert. SpaceLi

Carlsbad CA (SPX) Oct 13, 2022
Viasat Inc. (NASDAQ: VSAT) reports that reports that the ViaSat-3 Americas satellite has completed mechanical environmental testing. This is a significant milestone that is designed to verify the satellite can endure the rigors of launch and continues the momentum for launch later this year. During mechanical environmental testing, the ViaSat-3 Americas satellite was subjected to simulatio

NASA’s Artemis 1 mission and a Japanese lander are set to launch to the moon from Florida within days of each other in November.

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China launched a 5-meter-resolution synthetic aperture radar satellite late Wednesday, continuing a period of intense Chinese launch activity.

The post China launches radar satellite for environmental monitoring appeared first on SpaceNews.

A miniscule special ingredient blended with satellite materials could lead to significant mass savings for future missions. An ESA project with Adamant Composites in Greece tested how the addition of graphene – microscopic flakes of carbon just a single atom thick, combining robust strength with electrical conductivity – plus other nano-sized materials has the potential to optimise a satellite’s thermal and electrical properties.

Daunted but undeterred, I set off into the depths of venture capitalism, strategy, marketing, pitches, PowerPoint slides, NewSpace, small talk, zero-sum games, and artificial politeness.

The post Op-ed | You can’t go to space on a Ford Pinto (and other harsh truths I learned courting venture capital) appeared first on SpaceNews.