DLR – Spaceflight Now

InSight lander flown to California for final launch preps

March 2, 2018

NASA’s robotic InSight Mars lander arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this week aboard a U.S. Air Force cargo plane, ready for final testing, fueling and launch aboard an Atlas 5 rocket May 5, two years later the originally planned.

GRACE satellites to end research mission in November, before replacements launch

September 26, 2017

Two U.S.-German satellites launched more than 15 years ago to measure Earth’s changing gravity field will stop collecting data in November, a few months before a pair of replacement craft will launch to resume gravity measurements, NASA officials said.

Soyuz liftoff glimpsed by orbiting observer and launch pad cameras

July 19, 2017

The launch of a Russian Soyuz rocket July 14 with more than 70 satellites was captured in multiple views from a sharp-eyed orbiting nanosatellite and cameras positioned around the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Soyuz rocket lifts off with 73 satellites

July 14, 2017

A Russian Soyuz booster lifted off Friday from Kazakhstan on a complex mission to deploy 73 satellites into three different orbits, including a Russian spacecraft to locate forest fires, 48 CubeSats for Planet’s global Earth observation fleet, and eight nanosatellites for Spire Global’s commercial weather network.

Soyuz rolled out for launch of multinational satellite cluster

July 12, 2017

A Soyuz rocket arrived at a launch pad Tuesday in Kazakhstan for liftoff later this week with a satellite to monitor natural disasters and track forest fires from orbit and 72 secondary payloads from Russia, the United States, Germany, Norway and Japan.

InSight lander’s troubled seismometer passes major test

March 28, 2017

A balky interplanetary seismic instrument that ran into technical problems in 2015, forcing a two-year delay in the launch of NASA’s InSight lander to Mars, cleared a major test last week after engineers redesigned part of the sensor package, boosting confidence that the mission will be ready to blast off in May 2018.

Soyuz rolled to launch pad for first geostationary launch from French Guiana

January 24, 2017

A Russian-built Soyuz rocket moved to its launch pad on the northeastern coast of South America on Tuesday ahead of a Friday night flight with a Spanish-owned communications satellite to relay video and broadband signals between the Americas and Europe.

Hunt for water at Ceres goes underground

December 23, 2016

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has continued its survey of the dwarf planet Ceres this year, discovering rock-bound ice hidden just beneath the airless world’s rugged surface and a handful of icy outcrops inside craters in the northern hemisphere, raising hopes that Ceres could have once held a buried habitable ocean of liquid water.

Photos: PSLV climbs away from Indian spaceport

June 22, 2016

Firing into orbit from a barrier island on India’s east coast, a 145-foot-tall Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifted off early Wednesday to deploy 20 satellites in a perch more than 300 miles above Earth.

India’s PSLV blasts off with 20 satellites

June 22, 2016

A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifted off early Wednesday with an assortment of payloads for the Indian government, domestic universities, and institutions and companies from Indonesia, Canada, Germany and the United States, including a pathfinder satellite for Google’s Terra Bella Earth observation division.