Telenor Leases Thor 3 Broadband Capacity to Vicus Luxlink

Teleport services provider Vicus Luxlink leased six transponders of Thor 3 inclined-satellite capacity from Telenor Satellite Broadcasting (TSB) with the option of an additional two transponders.

Vicus Luxlink will use the capacity to provide Internet connectivity in the Middle East region from the 4 degrees West orbital location at speeds of more than 600 Mbps. Vicus Luxlink will support the service from its teleport facility in Germany and also install and manage its own platform at Cyta’s Makarios Teleport in Cyprus.
 

Thales Alenia Space To Build Multibeam Radar for CFOSat

Thales Alenia Space signed a contract with French space agency CNES to produce the Surface Waves Investigation and Monitoring (SWIM) instrument as part of a joint French-Chinese program to develop an Earth observation satellite.

The SWIM multibeam Ku-band radar will be integrated with the China France Oceanography Satellite (CFOSat), built by CNES and the China National Space Administration (CNSA). Thales Alenia Space has built similar spectrometers for other civil spacecraft, such as the Siral instrument on the Cryosat satellite, AltiKa on Saral and Poseidon on the Jason satellite.

CFOSat’s mission is to detect and characterize surface winds and ocean wave spectrum properties. The SWIM instrument will be paired with a SCAT instrument made by China to form the payload for the CFOSat satellite.