Arabsat orders all-electric Airbus satellite

 

Arabsat orders all-electric Airbus satellite


WASHINGTON — Fleet operator Arabsat of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, announced Aug. 18 it ordered a geostationary communications satellite from Airbus Defence and Space.

Arabsat said it plans to spend $300 million on the manufacture, launch, insurance and ground infrastructure for the satellite, called Badr-8. 

The satellite is expected to launch in 2023 to provide C- and Ku-band coverage over Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. Arabsat, which operates a fleet of seven satellites, said it will position Badr-8 at its 26 degrees East orbital slot. 

Airbus Defence and Space will build the satellite using Eurostar Neo, an all-electric platform designed with support from the French, British and European space agencies.

All-electric satellites move slower than their chemically-propelled counterparts, but require less volume for fuel, leaving more room for revenue-generating payloads. 

Khalid Balkheyour, Arabsat president and chief executive, said Badr-8 will carry “massive satellite transponders for satellite TV broadcasting, satellite telecommunications and information exchanging services.”

Airbus said the 4,500-kilogram, 17-kilowatt satellite should take four to five months to reach geostationary orbit, depending on the launch vehicle Arabsat selects.

Badr-8 will also carry an experimental photonics feeder link from Airbus called Teleo to demonstrate optical communications that Airbus says will be “highly robust” against signal jammers. 

Airbus is designing Badr-8 for a design life that exceeds 15 years, the company said. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies

Image
Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies WASHINGTON — The NASA Advisory Council has recommended that NASA review its existing planetary protection guidelines to balance the needs of science and exploration, an effort that could set the stage for a similar revision at the international level. The council, during a two-day meeting at NASA Headquarters Dec. 10–11, adopted a recommendation calling on NASA to establish an interdisciplinary committee of experts to review the agency’s current requirements for preventing contamination of other worlds by NASA spacecraft as well as any contamination of the Earth by materials brought back from those worlds. “NASA should establish a multidisciplinary task force of experts from industry, the scientific community, and relevant government agencies, to develop U.S. policies that properly balance the legitimate need to protect against the harmful contamination of the Earth or other celestial bodies with the scientific, social, and e...
Read more

You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon

Image
You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune A company wants to use an advanced balloon to fly customers from Earth’s surface in Alaska to the highest reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune,  The Anchorage Daily News  reported on Sunday. The balloon rides will be manned by a flight crew taking eight passengers in a pressurized capsule suspended beneath a hydrogen balloon the size of a football stadium. Each passenger could pay an estimated $125,000 for a six-hour journey. Mark Lester, CEO of Alaska Aerospace Corp., said the high-altitude rides will be available from Kodiak in a few years and will ...
Read more

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought Jupiter  appears to have more water than anyone expected. Newly released data from  NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested. The surprise result has scientists delving deep again into results from  NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter , which obtained drier results in 1995 when engineers deliberately threw the spacecraft into Jupiter's atmosphere. (Galileo was low on fuel and NASA didn't want to take the chance, even if it was a slight one, of the spacecraft accidentally crashing on a potentially habitable icy moon.) Reconciling the results from Galileo and Juno is key for sc...
Read more