A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket has just been launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on Sriharikota island, India. The cargo includes a series of small satellites including some nanosatellites such as the Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator (STRaND-1), based on a Google Nexus 1 smartphone running Android. Among the “real” satellites there’s the NEOSSat (the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite). A little more than 20 minutes after the launch, the satellites have been deployed into orbit successfully.

In recent days, the European Council approved a budget of 3,786 million Euros over seven years for the program originally called Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) and now known as Copernicus. It’s an initiative of ESA and the European Commission to create an autonomous system for the control of the territory.

Yesterday, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) satellite was launched on an Atlas V 401 rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base. Within a couple of hours, it successfully entered into orbit, deployed its solar panels and started sending telemetry data.

The Mars Rover Curiosity has been on Mars for several months but only now it made its first drilling test. For this test it used the drill mounted on its robotic arm to dig a hole in a rock named John Klein after an engineer of the project Curiosity who passed away in 2011.

A few hours ago the TDRS-K satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral and after a couple of hours it separated from the Centaur, the upper stage of the rocket, to enter geosynchronous orbit, where it will begin its work. The TDRS satellites are identified by a letter before becoming operational and by a number when they start working. Therefore, the TDRS-K satellite will become TDRS-11.