Space

• [New] The new small-satellite class could potentially replace the existing weather satellites that provide data to countries across the globe.
• [New] If Elon Musk's plan is true, up to five times the satellites sent by all companies around the world will be placed in orbit under the control of Elon Musk.
• [New] Aimed at New Space manufacturing challenges, MDA will develop industry 4.0 solutions in automated assembly and testing for high-volume satellite constellations.
• [New] OCX will replace the current Operational Control System, maintaining backwards compatibility with the Block IIR and IIR-M constellation and enabling new modernized capabilities onboard the Block IIR-M and IIF satellites.
• [New] Establishing a space for people of colour in Collingwood, including people of African, Middle Eastern, Asian, Pacific and South American backgrounds and cultures will be crucial going forward if an inclusive culture is to be created.
• [New] NASA kicked off a new era of Mars exploration Thursday with the successful landing of Perseverance, a car-size robotic explorer that will search for traces of ancient life on the planet and collect what could be the first rocky samples from Mars that are sent back to Earth.
• [New] To help scientists search for clues that Mars might have been a living planet, Perseverance will stuff its pockets with rock samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for detailed scrutiny.
• [New] The Mars 2020 mission will search for signs of ancient microbial life and collect rock samples that will be returned to Earth later in the decade.
• [New] China is now condensing the space station construction schedule into an intensive two-year period, maintaining the target of completing the Chinese Space Station by the end of 2022.
• [New] The Southern Positioning Augmentation Network which is being jointly developed by the Australian and New Zealand governments has recently completed an 18-month trial and will become fully operational in 2023.
• [New] NASA, international space agencies, and private companies must work together to create planetary protection guidelines that balance the benefits of human exploration with the risk of contamination.
• [New] Future missions by NASA and the European Space Agency will ferry the Mars rocks back.
• [New] Engineers will use data from Perseverance's EDL to further tighten the landing ellipse for the fetch rover, hopefully shrinking the distance it needs to travel across the planet's surface.
• [New] Ongoing advances in environmental data science create opportunities for new research questions, disciplines, perspectives, and data techniques to address a variety of challenges as humanity continues to have widespread and changing impacts on our planet.
• [New] After deploying the first five satellites to a 550 km circular orbit, Photon's Curie engine will reignite to lower its attitude and deploy the final satellite to a 450 km orbit.
• [New] Perseverance is carrying a technology experiment - the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter - that will attempt the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.
• [New] NASA is working with the European Space Agency on a campaign to bring Mars rock samples back to Earth, and ESA and Roscosmos have a second Exo-Mars launch planned for next that will look for signs of past like.
• [New] SpaceX plans to launch 12000 satellites by 2024 to form a huge satellite chain network to provide Internet services for people in all regions of the world.
• [New] The six-wheeled rover is expected to take seven minutes to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere to the planet's surface in less time than the 11-minute-plus radio transmission to Earth.
• [New] Longtime satellite company Telesat, based in Ottawa, Canada, announced Tuesday it would build a new network, called Lightspeed, with 298 satellites providing service by 2023.
• [New] The question of whether SpaceX will launch enough satellites to cover the areas it needs to cover and provide reliable service remains.
• [New] Failure could take on many forms next week when NASA's next-gen rover, Perseverance, reaches the surface of the Red Planet.

Last updated: 21 February 2021