News briefs: March 29
Posted: Sat, Mar 30, 2002, 10:21 AM ET (1521 GMT)
- Northrop Grumman announced late Friday that it has extended the deadline for its hostile takeover bid for TRW from March 29 until April 12. TRW shareholders now have two additional weeks to offer to tender their shares to Northrop at $47/share. Northrop said it had received offers for 2.1 million shares of TRW common stock, about 1.7 percent of outstanding shares.
- Commercial space development company SpaceDev announced Friday that the company had a net loss of $1.86 million in fiscal year 2001. The company attributes the loss to increased non-cash expenses, such as stock options and changes in goodwill accounting. SpaceDev's net sales increased to $4.1 million in 2001, compared to $3.9 million in 2000, and the company has an order backlog of $3.4 million, a half-million higher than a year ago.
- Engineers have corrected a problem that shut down an instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft for over a week, Space News reported Friday. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument went into safe mode on March 19, apparently because of a glitch with a circuit board in the instrument. The instrument was restored from safe mode on March 28 after operators uploaded a software patch. A version of MODIS will fly on NASA's Aqua spacecraft next month; engineers have replaced the suspect circuit board on that version to prevent a similar problem from affecting it.
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