Mission managers say the shoebox-sized LightSail satellite powered up its tiny deployment motor Sunday, and data from the diminutive spacecraft indicate its experimental solar sail unfurled in orbit hundreds of miles above Earth.
After an up-and-down week of intermittent contact with the LightSail satellite, the tiny spacecraft radioed home Saturday, giving engineers hope to deploy the experiment’s solar sail as soon as Sunday.
The Canadian government announced Tuesday its intention to support the International Space Station through 2024, joining the United States and Russia as the major partners officially backing an extension of the global research project.
The launch of a U.S.-French oceanography satellite from California has been postponed from July 22 after engineers discovered contamination in one of the spacecraft’s thrusters at its factory in France.
Russia says a design bug from the pairing of a Progress spacecraft with an upgraded version of the venerable Soyuz launcher led to the loss of a resupply mission bound for the International Space Station on April 28.
The first pair of RD-181 rocket engines set to launch on Orbital ATK’s redesigned Antares rocket are in the final stages of acceptance testing in Russia ahead of their export to the United States in early July, officials said.
The Planetary Society’s LightSail spacecraft is back in contact with ground controllers after nine days of radio silence triggered by a suspected software glitch, and engineers plan to send the command to unfurl the tiny satellite’s solar sail as soon as Wednesday.
NASA has placed an order with Boeing for the first operational mission to ferry a crew to the International Space Station in a new era of commercial human spaceflight.
An Ariane 5 rocket fired into space from a tropical spaceport in French Guiana on Wednesday, successfully delivering two television broadcast satellites into high-altitude orbits for DirecTV and Sky Mexico.