 | Top Stories
Ariane 6 made its long-awaited inaugural launch Tuesday, but the mission was not a complete success. The rocket lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 3:01 p.m. Eastern Tuesday after a brief delay caused by a data-acquisition issue. The rocket's upper stage reached orbit and deployed several cubesats and activated experiments that remained mounted on the stage. However, the rocket was not able to perform a final burn to deorbit because of a problem with its auxiliary propulsion unit (APU). That kept it from deploying two reentry capsules as originally planned. Officials said that despite the APU issue they considered the launch a success and planned to move ahead with its first operational launch late this year. [SpaceNews]
A House bill would give NASA a lot of homework to do. The bipartisan leadership of the House Science Committee released its version of a NASA authorization act on Tuesday, with the committee scheduled to mark up the bill today. The bill would formally authorize many ongoing NASA programs, but also direct the agency, and in some cases the GAO, to study aspects of those programs, such as alternative users of the Space Launch System and commercial procurement of space weather data. [SpaceNews]
Astroscale says its ADRAS-J spacecraft continues to inspect a derelict upper stage despite a recent anomaly. The company said Tuesday the spacecraft suffered an "unexpected attitude anomaly" while flying around the H-2A upper stage at a distance of 50 meters. The spacecraft aborted the maneuver and moved a safe distance away, which Astroscale says demonstrates best practices for such operations. ADRAS-J will resume its close maneuvers to the stage soon, the company stated. ADRAS-J is a precursor to a mission that will attempt to deorbit the stage. [SpaceNews]
A new Japanese venture wants to develop a module for commercial space stations. Mitsui & Co. formally established a subsidiary called Japan LEO Shachu, Inc., this month. The new venture's CEO said at the Spacetide conference Tuesday that the company is proposing to develop a module based on the HTV and HTV-X cargo spacecraft that could be installed on commercial stations. The company is looking to attract both commercial and government users for the module. [SpaceNews]
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| Other News
Maxar Intelligence is now offering 15-centimeter imagery for major metropolitan areas. The Vivid Advanced 15-centimeter HD Basemap, unveiled Tuesday, will be particularly important for mapping and navigation applications, the company says. Customers for the upgraded imagery include national map makers. In addition, the maps will serve customers focused on visualization and simulation. For areas of frequent change, Maxar's goal is annual refresh, while elsewhere it will update images every other year. [SpaceNews]
NASA has assigned a backup astronaut for the Artemis 2 mission. The agency said Andre Douglas will train as a backup for any of the three NASA astronauts on the prime crew for the lunar flyby mission: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch. The fourth person on the mission, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, has his own backup, fellow Canadian Jenni Gibbons. [NASA]
One part of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program is making progress. The ESA-led Earth Return Orbiter recently passed its critical design review, validating the design of the spacecraft. Under the current architecture, the spacecraft will go into orbit around Mars and pick up the sample canister placed in orbit by NASA's Sample Retrieval Lander, then return it to Earth. NASA is currently examining changes to the MSR architecture to reduce its cost and shorten its schedule, and it's unclear how it might affect plans for the Earth Return Orbiter. [ESA]
The GOES-U weather satellite has reached geostationary orbit and taken a new name. NOAA said this week that GOES-U, launched last month on a Falcon Heavy, performed the final maneuver to go into GEO. NOAA has now renamed the spacecraft GOES-19, following its practice to giving such spacecraft numerical designations once they reach their final orbit. GOES-19 still has months of commissioning work to complete before it can enter service. It is scheduled to take over from GOES-16 as the GOES-East operational satellite next April. [NOAA]
| |  | Woodstock for Smallsats
"I went to the very first one in 1987, and there were, I think, 25 people in a small room. It was considered a little bit of a hippie convention of people who were having crazy ideas about building small satellites."
– Sir Martin Sweeting of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., discussing the very first Conference on Small Satellites at Utah State University during a talk Wednesday at the Spacetide conference on Tokyo. Last year's conference, he noted, had 3,700 attendees.
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