WASHINGTON — The Perseverance rover is in good condition on the surface of Mars, NASA officials said Feb. 22, showing off stunning video from its landing on the red planet last week.

At a briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, project leaders said the rover was continuing to perform checkouts of various systems, including deployments of its high-gain antenna and instrument mast, since landing in Jezero Crater Feb.

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.

 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.

WASHINGTON — Millennium Engineering and Integration received a $13.2 million award from the U.S. Space Force on Feb. 19 for services in support of the certification of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket.

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.

WASHINGTON — L3Harris Technologies announced Feb. 23 it has received a $137 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.

WASHINGTON — The White House said Feb. 23 has no schedule for nominating a NASA administrator as a new round of rumors swirl about who might be selected to lead the agency.

The topic arose at a press conference when a reporter asked press secretary Jen Psaki about rumors that the Biden administration was considering Bill Nelson, a former senator from Florida, for the post.

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.