CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Atlantis and its crew
of seven astronauts ended an 11-day journey of nearly 4.5
million miles with a landing Friday at NASA’s Kennedy Space
Centre in Florida.

The W7 satellite of Eutelsat Communications has been successfully lofted into orbit by a Proton Breeze M rocket supplied by ILS.

Cannes, France – Thales Alenia Space has delivered the second flight model high-resolution (HR) optical imaging instrument for integration, testing and validation in the Pleiades earth observation satellite in construction at Astrium facilities in Toulouse.

Twelve years of design, development and hard work have come to fruition with the formal handover of Node 3 from ESA to NASA on 20 November 2009. The ceremony took place in the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA.

Kourou -French Guiana – The site of a ground station for Galileo, Europe’s global navigation satellite system, inside the Guiana Space Centre (CSG), near Kourou in French Guiana, was inaugurated on 19 November.

At 11:51 a.m. EST on November 18th, Commander Charlie Hobaugh backed space shuttle Atlantis into pressurized mating adapter #2 on the International Space Station’s Harmony node. The two spacecraft were flying 220 miles above Earth between Australia and Tasmania at the time they docked.

Paris – Eutelsat Communications and Asia Broadcast Satellite (ABS) announced the execution of a strategic agreement for commercial cooperation at the 75° East orbital location.

Kennedy Space Center, Florida – Atlantis is finally on its way to ISS with mission STS-129 crew.

MOFFETT FIELD, California – NASA announces that preliminary data from Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicate that the mission successfully uncovered water in a permanently shadowed lunar crater. The discovery opens a new chapter in our understanding of the moon.

 
Cannes, France – Thales Alenia Space reports that the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) spacecraft, developed and built by Thales Alenia Space for the European Space Agency (ESA), has completed its in-orbit commissioning and calibration phase, by successfully passing an in-flight test review last week.