Suzaku (formerly ASTRO-EII) was an X-ray astronomy satellite developed jointly by the Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science at JAXA and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to probe high energy X-ray sources, such as supernova explosions, black holes and galactic clusters. It was launched on 10 July 2005 aboard the M-V rocket on the M-V-6 mission. After its successful launch, the satellite was renamed Suzaku after the mythical Vermilion bird of the South
Low Earth OrbitThe Ekspress-AM 2 and 3 series are communications satellites for russian domestic communication services. The lifetime of the spacecraft has been increased to 12 years. While the spacecraft itself is built by russian RSCC (Kosmicheskiya Svyaz), the communication payloads are built by Alcatel.
Geostationary OrbitCosmos 1 was a project by Cosmos Studios and The Planetary Society to test a solar sail in space. As part of the project, an unmanned solar-sail spacecraft named Cosmos 1 was launched into space at 15:46:09 EDT (19:46:09 UTC) on June 21, 2005 from the submarine Borisoglebsk in the Barents Sea. However, a rocket failure prevented the spacecraft from reaching its intended orbit.
Low Earth OrbitFoton-M No.2 was an unmanned Foton-M spacecraft which carried a European payload for the European Space Agency (ESA). The spacecraft carried a 600-kilogram (1,300 lb) payload, including 385 kilograms (849 lb) of experiments; consisting of 39 experiments in fluid physics, biology, material science, meteoritics, radiation dosimetry and exobiology (BIOPAN-5). Some of the experiments were designed by the ESA's student programme. One notable experiment tested the ability of lichen to survive in space. It was successful, as the lichen survived over 14 days of exposure to space.
Low Earth OrbitThe DirecTV 8 satellite provides selectable medium and high power Ku-band broadcast services to the U.S. on up to 32 transponders. The service is optimized to support the current and next generation higher coding rate services that DirecTV provides.
Geostationary Orbit