After weather delays, a Russian-built Soyuz ST-b/Fregat MT launch vehicle on flight VS-26 operated by Arianespace and commissioned by ESA, lifted off with the pair of 715 kg Galileo navigation satellites from Sinnamary, near Kourou, French Guiana at 0019 GMT on 5...
A Vega rocket lifted-off from the European Spaceport, French Guiana, carrying the Pleiades Neo 4 reconnaissance satellite plus four small co-payloads at 0147 GMT on 17 August. The payloads were carried to sun-synchronous low Earth orbit and were sequentially deployed...
Some years ago this column started its annual analysis called “The Great Space Race”. The idea was that while the original “Moon race” ended in 1969 when the USA beat the Soviet Union onto the lunar surface with its Apollo 11 human landing, a new one has...
ESA decided the winner of its fifth “Medium-class” Cosmic Vision competition on 10 June. Out of the two finalists the Venus-oriented “EnVision” orbiter won out over the gamma-ray burst studying “THESEUS”. The initial call for...
The first launch that took place on 29 April was conducted by Arianespace. This mission saw a Vega rocket successfully lift-off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 0150 GMT. The targeted orbit for the mission was Sun-synchronous orbit at 628 km (613 km for the rideshare...
ESA has selected SSTL to build and operate a 40 kg spacecraft for its HydroGNSS mission under its Scout programme. The €30 million HydroGNSS mission uses GNSS Reflectometry for hydrological measurements. In effect it uses signals from GPS and Galileo, as radar...
