Aerospace & Defense Roundup: Jan, 7

Launch service operator Arianespace is planning up to 20 launches with its Ariane 5, Soyuz and Vega rockets in 2020, a year that will mark further diversification in satellite design, CEO Stephane Israel said during the company’s annual press conference Jan. 7.

The Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics (Asteria) satellite, a joint effort by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to miniaturize a spacecraft for extrasolar planet detection, has gone quiet.

SpaceX’s 19th NASA-contracted Dragon resupply mission spacecraft returned to Earth Jan. 7, splashing down under parachute for recovery in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Long Beach, California, following a one-month stay at the International Space Station (ISS).

Carmaker Hyundai has announced an urban air mobility (UAM) partnership with Uber and unveiled a full-scale mockup of its S-A1 electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft at the CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas.

E2-D

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched in April 2018 on a $357 million, two-year primary mission led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to seek out planets around the nearest stars, has claimed its first discovery of an Earth-like world in the habitable zone of a neighboring star.

SpaceX has opened what it hopes will be a bustling 2020 launch manifest of 35-38 missions with the Jan. 6 liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a third batch of Starlink broadband communications satellites.