ESA EADS Alphasat experiences Deep Space on Earth: Interspace

Tucked away in a vacuum chamber for several months, Europe's largest telecom satellite has faced the harsh conditions it will deal with once it is launched into space this summer.

Testing at Intespace in Toulouse, France, simulated conditions close to those Alphasat will experience in flight, including the intense cold of its transfer orbits in the early stages of the mission.

Not only was Alphasat's ability to control its temperature tested, but other features were also put through their paces to ensure everything can run under the extreme cold and hot conditions.

"If you were going to test a new car for extreme conditions, you would probably want to do the same thing: not only check the heating and air conditioning, but also make sure that the engine, brakes, ignition and radio work in low temperatures as well as high," explained Philippe Sivac, ESA's Alphasat acting project manager.

To monitor the satellite inside the large chamber, nearly 600 temperature sensors were attached in key locations. A satellite the size of Alphasat can also carry up to 400 flight thermal sensors.

Readouts are displayed in real time, together with the satellite's internal data to help build an overall picture for the team monitoring Alphasat around the clock.

Running Alphasat under very stable thermal situations showed that the thermal-mathematical model is well suited to predict the temperatures in orbit.

"Finally, the performance and functional tests show that all the electronics and software perform as expected even at extreme temperatures."

Russian Rocket failure: US Satellite Plunges into Pacific Ocean

A Russian rocket carrying a US telecoms satellite plunged into the Pacific Ocean on Friday only moments after being launched from a mobile sea platform in Moscow's latest space failure.

The rocket may have veered off course from the moment of take-off because of heavy waves battering the former northern seas oil platform, initial reports said.

The Intelsat-27's loss means the giant Boeing aerospace corporation would for now be unable to fit the final piece of a constellation mean to provide TV feeds across Europe and the United States.

"There was an accident during the Zenit-3L rocket launch," a source at the Energia corporation that makes the Zenit-3SL rocket used to lift up Intelsat satellites told AFP.

"The rocket fell into the Pacific Ocean."

Officials said no one was hurt on the huge Odyssey Sea Launch platform that was once stationed off the oil-rich coast of Norway before being tugged to the Pacific by an international consortium called Sea Launch.

Energia chief Vitaly Lopota said the Russian rocket's engine appeared to fail less than a minute after the evening take-off but the reason was still unknown reason.

"We had an abnormal situation -- the emergency shutdown of the first stage engine," Lopota told the state RIA Novosti news agency.

"It happened 50 seconds into the flight. We are now looking into what happened."

Several Russian media reports said the platform itself was unstable at the time of the launch because of heavy weather.

Sources said the Zenit had purposefully steered itself as far away from the Odyssey as possible -- instead of going straight up -- because the engines detected a problem and were programmed to save the ground crew.

"The rockets detected an abnormal situation linked to platform instability from the very start, and then switched the engines over (to operations) aimed at steering the rocket away from the platform," a space industry source reported.

Sea Launch has been using the deep-sea platform to perform commercial operations since 1999. There had been only two complete failures out of the 34 missions conducted prior to Friday's launch.

Having emerged from bankruptcy protection in October 2010 after years of financial difficulties, Sea Launch will be keen to prove that the accident was an anomaly that should not affect future launches, space analysts said.

"This accident is very unpleasant for Sea Launch, which only recently started to repair its reputation on the commercial space services market," said Moscow's Space News magazine editor Igor Marinin.

Russia's space programme is under close scrutiny because it provides the world's only manned link to the International Space Station (ISS).

Southern Star's SkyCube: a Social Media Space Mission

Southern Stars Group LLC, the company responsible for the popular SkySafari apps for iOS, Android and Mac OS X, is thinking a little bigger with its next project.

The publicly funded SkyCube is a miniature CubeSat satellite that will orbit the planet, transmitting low-resolution images of the Earth while broadcasting short messages from sponsors in the form of data pings. In short, it's the world's first social space mission.

The hardware involved in the project isn't anything we haven't seen before. The satellite itself is a 10x10x10 cm (3.9 cubic-inch) “1U” CubeSat, which is the current leading picosatellite standard with nearly 100 of the devices built and launched to date.

The SkyCube will be the second payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, set to launch sometime in 2013.

Once deployed, it will orbit more than 300 miles (483 km) up, taking low-resolution pictures and broadcasting short, simple messages from the project's sponsors as it crosses over most of the world's inhabited regions.

At the end of the mission, the SkyCube will deploy its 10 ft (3 m) diameter balloon, making it visible from the Earth, with a brightness akin to that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

If everything goes to plan, the miniature satellite will eventually return to Earth, brought down by atmospheric drag.

So if you want to broadcast your own short message from space, the Southern Stars Group has got your back, with pledges starting at just US$1.

This base option gives you a ten-second time slot on the mission, in which you can broadcast a single 120-character message.

The sponsorship options go all the way up to $10k, for which the company will fly two people out to Cape Canaveral from anywhere in the continental US.

From there, sponsors can watch the satellite lift off and once it's successfully in orbit, they can control the SkyCube for an entire day to take pictures, send messages, or just sit back and contemplate the balance of their bank accounts.

Russian Proton-M Rocket to launch US Telecoms satellite

A Russian Proton-M rocket carrying a U.S. telecommunications satellite has been delivered to a launch pad at the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan in preparation for the February 12 launch.

The carrier rocket will put into orbit the Intelsat-16 satellite, which was developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation for the Intelsat Ltd., a leading provider of satellite services worldwide.

The Intelsat-16 satellite is equipped with 24 transponders and will provide telecommunications services to customers in Brazil and Mexico.

Intelsat Ltd. operates the world's most extensive satellite network, comprising over 50 satellites.

Russia last launched an Intelsat satellite in December last year.