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After many years of study, development, building and testing, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, has finally arrived at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. At the end of 2022 the spacecraft underwent its final thermal vacuum test at an Airbus Defence and Space facility in Toulouse, as well as its final software verification tests, whereby it was controlled from the ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany.

Soon, an Ariane 5 will lift Juice into orbit and send it on its journey to explore the largest planet in our Solar System and its three icy moons, Europa,

Week in images: 13-17 February 2023

Discover our week through the lens

Image: The Liverpool Land peninsula, on the east coast of Greenland, is featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.

Space Coast FL (SPX) Feb 15, 2023
Maxar Technologies has signed a contract for dedicated access to Umbra' Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery constellation, the companies announced February 14. SAR satellites are able to see past clouds, smoke, and complete darkness using the company's advanced resolution, licensed down to 13 centimeters. "Maxar and Umbra are breaking new ground for the geospatial intelligence ind

Boca Raton FL (SPX) Feb 15, 2023
About 40 percent of interior Alaska is underlain by ice-rich permafrost - permanently frozen grounds made up of soil, gravel and sand - bound together by ice. Certain conditions, such as climate warming, have intensified tundra wildfires which have profound implications for permafrost thaw. Surface vegetation plays a dominant role in protecting permafrost from summer warmth, so any alterat

San Francisco (SPX) Feb 16, 2023
San Francisco-based geostationary communications satellite operator and manufacturer Astranis Space Technologies announced on February 14, that they won a U.S. Space Force contract worth up to $10 million to integrate the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) Protected Tactical Waveform (PTW) using Astranis satellite assets. The Phase III Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract con

Santa Fe NM (SPX) Feb 16, 2023
Solstar Space (Solstar), the company making persistent on-orbit communications available, announced it was awarded a Phase I STTR contract by the Department of Air Force (DAF) to evaluate the company's Slayton Space Communicator for high-speed data communications. Solstar Space is developing a flight-proven modular device for spacecraft integration capable of providing satellite operators

Beijing (XNA) Feb 16, 2023
The China Manned Space Agency began to solicit logos on Wednesday for the country's upcoming crewed space missions, marking the first open logo solicitation of its manned space program. The event aims to solicit logos for three missions of China's manned space program this year, including the launches of the cargo craft Tianzhou 6, and the crewed spaceships Shenzhou XVI and Shenzhou XVII,

Reading UK (SPX) Feb 16, 2023
ALL.SPACE, creator of the world's first smart terminal, has announced the latest in a series of strategic executive team appointments ahead of milestone deliveries of its transformational multi-link connectivity platform to commercial and government customers beginning early this year. The latest to join the fast-growing ALL.SPACE team is Mark Steel, who was named Executive Vice President

Tokyo (AFP) Feb 17, 2023
Japan's next-generation rocket failed to launch on Friday after an apparent ignition problem, the national space agency said. The H3 rocket - the successor to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)'s H-IIA model, which debuted in 2001 - was meant to launch mid-morning from Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan. But "it appears that we failed to ignite the two solid rock