The Rocket Lab’s 30th Electron rocket sent a flying radar satellite into Earth’s orbit on Thursday (September 15).
The Electron The booster took off from New Zealand’s Rocket Lab site on the North Island’s Mahia peninsula on Thursday at 4:38 p.m. EDT (2038 GMT, or 8:38 a.m. local time on Friday, September 16).
The direct launch of the Strix-1 satellite on behalf of Synspective showed the missile flying in the blue sky, with no technical problems reported during the launch or during the countdown. Since the launch window was instant, everything had to go properly to allow the mission to move forward.
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Thursday’s mission is called “The Owl Spreads Its Wings,” a reference to the Strix-1 payload. (Strix It is a diverse and widespread genus of owls.)
“Strix-1 is Synspective’s first commercial satellite for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites to deliver images that can detect millimeter-level changes at the Earth’s surface from space, regardless of atmospheric conditions on Earth and at any time of day or night,” officials rocket lab Written in the description of the task (Opens in a new tab).
Rocket Lab has also successfully upgraded the Strix satellites for Synspective In December 2020 And the February 2022. Those expeditions were named for owl themes as well.
Rocket Lab officials coined this launch as a landmark mission: Thursday’s mission was the Rocket Lab’s 30th electron launch, bringing the 150th satellite into space and flying the 300th Rutherford engine.
The trip also follows the success of Rocket Lab NASA’s CAPSTONE probe launched to the moon. In addition, the company aims to send one or more Searching for life expeditions to Venus in the coming years.
Rocket Lab plans to make Electron’s first stage fully reusable, and has successfully powered a booster that has been recovered (and inadvertently submerged in the ocean) By helicopter on May 2during a mission called “there and back again”.
However, the company made no attempt to recover upon Thursday’s launch, and Electron’s first stage naturally dipped into the brew after the engine was cut off.
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