Scott Nicholas
A group of Lockheed Martin engineers and technicians has integrated a modernized A2100 communications satellite built for Arabsat and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia ahead of a scheduled launch in the second quarter of 2018.
Lockheed said Thursday Hellas-Sat/SaudiGeosat-1 is designed to provide telecommunications services for Arabsat customers across the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
“We’ve modeled this activity in our virtual reality lab hundreds of times, but this is the first time we’ve performed the integration activity of our modernized A2100 satellite in a clean room,” said Rick Ambrose, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space Systems and an inductee into Executive Mosaic‘s Wash100 for 2017.
“Mating the scalable modules together in a precise method was a critical step for the program, and the team did an exceptional job,” Ambrose added.
Arabsat tapped Lockheed in 2015 to build two satellites in a push to expand the operator’s fleet of internet, telephone, television and secure communications satellites that currently operate in orbit.
Lockheed updated the A2100 spacecraft’s power, propulsion and electronics systems.
