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[…] As the first half of 2022 wraps up, SpaceX has flown 27 Falcon 9 missions in the year’s first 26 weeks. Those 27 missions have been executed using only ten boosters, two of which only entered service this year. […]
[…] communications satellite towards Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). Liftoff of the B1073 core—which entered service just last month with a 53-strong haul of Starlink low-orbiting internet commun…—took place at 5:04 p.m. EDT, right on the opening of a two-hour “window”. It marked the third […]
As 2022's first half ends, 27th #Falcon9 flies with @SES_Satellites #SES22 payload. Twenty-seven missions so far in 2022, using only ten boosters further cements @SpaceX reusability credentials.
The post SpaceX Wraps Up Five-Launch June, Delivers SES-22 to Orbit first appeared on AmericaSpace.
[…] ao contrário da NASA, os militares tenham opções. No último fim de semana, a SpaceX lançou um satélite de comunicações chamado Globalstar-2, mas rastreadores de satélites acreditam que a missão também […]
Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The Falcon 9 rocket will launch the SES 22 geostationary communications satellite. Follow us on Twitter.
SpaceX is preparing to launch a television broadcasting satellite Wednesday for SES, with liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral set for 5:04 p.m. EDT (2104 GMT).
There’s a two-hour window for SpaceX’s launch Wednesday, and the official launch weather outlook predicts an 80% chance of favorable weather for liftoff.
SpaceX ground crews rolled the Falcon 9 rocket and its commercial satellite payload to pad 40 earlier this week, and raised it vertical in the launch mount at pad 40 for final checkouts. The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) launcher will be filled with a million pounds of kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants in the final 35 minutes of the countdown Wednesday.
If weather and technical parameters are all “green” for launch, the nine Merlin main engines on the first stage booster will come to life with the help of an ignition fluid called triethylaluminum/triethylborane, or TEA-TEB. Once the engines are at full throttle, hydraulic clamps will open to release the Falcon 9 for its climb into space.
The nine main engines will produce 1.7 million pounds of thrust for about two-and-a-half minutes, propelling the Falcon 9 and the SES 22 communications satellite into the upper atmosphere. Then the booster stage — tail number B1073 in SpaceX’s fleet — will shut down and separate from the Falcon 9’s upper stage.
The booster will extend titanium grid fins and pulse cold gas thrusters to orient itself for a tail-first entry back into the atmosphere, before reigniting its engines for a braking burn and a final landing burn, targeting a vertical decent to the drone ship “A Shortfall of Gravitas” parked more than 400 miles (about 670 kilometers) east of Cape Canaveral.
The landing will mark the completion of the booster’s second flight to space, following a debut mission in May carrying Starlink internet satellites into orbit.
The upper stage’s single Merlin engine will fire two times to inject the SES 22 spacecraft into an elliptical, or oval-shaped, transfer orbit ranging more than 20,000 miles above Earth. Deployment of the SES 22 satellite from the Falcon 9 upper stage is scheduled at T+plus 33 minutes, 26 seconds, according to a mission timeline provided by SpaceX.
Built in France by Thales Alenia Space, the SES 22 satellite weighs about 7,700 pounds, or 3.5 metric tons, fully fueled for launch.
After separation from the Falcon 9 launcher, SES 22 will unfurl its solar panels and antennas, and perform a series of orbit-raising burns with a liquid-fueled engine to circularize its orbit at geostationary altitude over the equator. After completing in-orbit verification testing, SES 22 is scheduled to enter commercial service in early August, according to Christophe De Hauwer, SES’s chief strategy and development officer.
The SES 22 satellite is the first mission to replenish SES’s fleet of C-band television broadcast satellites to replace C-band capacity being transitioned to 5G cellular network services by the Federal Communications Commission.
“SES 22 is a C-band satellite, so it’s part of our program of for the C-band clearing in the U.S.,” De Hauwer said in a pre-launch interview with Spaceflight Now. “So it’s a C-band only satellite. It will be launched to 135 degrees west, which is the location we are replenishing, from where we will provide mostly TV and radio services over the U.S., but also some data services over the country.”
From its parking spot in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator at 135 degrees west longitude, SES 22 will begin a 15-year mission beaming cable TV programming for SES’s corporate clients.
The Federal Communications Commission’s finalized a program in 2020 to clear 300 megahertz of C-band spectrum for the roll-out of 5G mobile connectivity networks.
The FCC auctioned U.S. C-band spectrum — previously used for satellite-based video broadcast services to millions of customers — to 5G operators.
In compensation for losing the spectrum, SES is set to receive nearly $4 billion from the winners of an auction to redistribute the C-band capacity to 5G operators. The reimbursement will pay for the expense of building and launching the new satellites. Intelsat, another large C-band telecom operator, is set to receive nearly $5 billion to pay for its own new communications satellites.
SES ordered six new C-band broadcasting satellites, including one ground spare, from Thales Alenia Space, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman in 2020. SES 22 is the first of the six new satellites to reach the launch pad.
The remaining four C-band replacement satellites SES plans to send up are booked to launch in pairs on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket and a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral later this year.
ROCKET: Falcon 9 (B1073.2)
PAYLOAD: SES 22 communications satellite
LAUNCH SITE: SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida
LAUNCH DATE: June 29, 2022
LAUNCH WINDOW: 5:04-7:04 p.m. EDT (2104-2304 GMT)
WEATHER FORECAST: 80% probability of acceptable weather
BOOSTER RECOVERY: “A Shortfall of Gravitas” drone ship
LAUNCH AZIMUTH: East
TARGET ORBIT: Geostationary transfer orbit
LAUNCH TIMELINE:
MISSION STATS:
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United Launch Alliance teams at Cape Canaveral are preparing to roll an Atlas 5 rocket to its launch pad Wednesday, moving the launcher into position for liftoff Thursday evening with a pair of geostationary satellites for the U.S. Space Force.
The rollout is expected to begin around 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT), when the Atlas 5 is expected to emerge from the Vertical Integration Facility south of the launch pad. The 196-foot-tall (59.7-meter-tall) rocket will ride a mobile launch platform along rail tracks to Space Launch Complex 41, the East Coast home of Atlas 5 launch operations.
The 1,800-foot (550-meter) trip should take about one hour, with the Atlas 5 and its mobile launch platform driven by a pair of trackmobile locomotives. The rocket and its platform weigh about 1.8 million pounds during the rollout to the pad.
Once in position at pad 41, the Atlas 5 will be connected to propellant loading lines and other ground systems. ULA’s launch team plans to load rocket-grade RP-1 kerosene fuel into the Atlas 5’s first stage Wednesday afternoon. The kerosene will feed the rocket’s Russian-made RD-180 main engine, in combination with super-cold liquid oxygen to be pumped into the Atlas 5 during the countdown Thursday.
Liftoff Thursday is set for 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT), the opening of a two-hour launch window. There is a 60% chance of favorable weather for Thursday’s launch window, according to the Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron.
The Atlas 5 launch Thursday is codenamed USSF 12. The rocket’s Centaur upper stage will target a circular geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator, a destination that will require three upper stage burns and about six hours to reach.
One of the payloads on the mission is the Space Force’s Wide Field Of View, or WFOV, testbed satellite to demonstrate a new infrared sensor capable of detecting and tracking missile launches, providing early warning of a potential attack on the United States of allied nations.
The WFOV spacecraft will ride to space in the upper portion of the Atlas 5 rocket’s payload compartment. A secondary payload, called the USSF 12 Ring, is positioned below the WFOV spacecraft for launch. It hosts multiple payloads, experiments and prototypes, but details about their missions are classified.
ULA personnel began stacking the Atlas 5 rocket May 27 inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, with the raising of the launcher’s first stage onto the mobile platform that will carry it to the launch pad.
The first stage was stacked on the mobile launch platform eight days after the previous Atlas 5 launch May 19, which carried Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule into orbit on a test flight to the International Space Station.
Teams added four Northrop Grumman-built solid rocket boosters, which will provide extra thrust in the first minute-and-a-half of the flight, firing in unison with the core stage’s Russian-made RD-180 engine. Then ULA installed the Centaur upper stage, with a single Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10 engine.
Stacking of the 94th Atlas 5 rocket was completed June 15 with the hoisting of the payload module, the uppermost portion of the launch vehicle. The two U.S. Space Force spacecraft were encapsulated inside the payload fairing in a nearby clean room.
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A new European-built television broadcasting satellite to cover the United States is set for liftoff Wednesday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the first of 11 SES-owned telecom spacecraft scheduled to fly on six launches from Cape Canaveral by the end of the year.
The launches for SES, one of the largest traditional telecom satellite operators, will use five SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets and one United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.
Five of the satellites, including the SES 22 spacecraft set for launch Wednesday, are designed for C-band television broadcast services over the United States. SES also plans to launch the first six satellites for the company’s O3b mPower broadband network, providing data connectivity and internet services around the world.
The first six O3b mPower satellites will launch on three Falcon 9 rockets, heading for positions in a unique orbit at an altitude of about 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers). Those three launches are currently on track to fly by the end of 2022, according to SES.
The upcoming satellite deployment campaign comes after a relatively quiet period in launches for SES, with just one new SES satellite launched since 2019. But the schedules for two different segments of SES’s business have aligned to create this year’s rapid-fire launch cadence.
The O3b mPower program, first announced in 2017, is nearing the finish line in development. And the SES 22 launch is the first mission to replenish SES’s fleet of C-band television broadcast satellites to replace C-band capacity being transitioned to 5G cellular network services by the Federal Communications Commission.
“SES 22 is a C-band satellite, so it’s part of our program of for the C-band clearing in the U.S.,” said Christophe De Hauwer, SES’s chief strategy and development officer. “So it’s a C-band only satellite. It will be launched to 135 degrees west, which is the location we are replenishing, from where we will provide mostly TV and radio services over the U.S., but also some data services over the country.”
From its parking spot in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator at 135 degrees west longitude, SES 22 will begin a 15-year mission beaming cable TV programming for SES’s corporate clients.
The SES 22 satellite, weighing about 7,700 pounds (3.5 metric tons), is heading for a position in geostationary orbit after launch Wednesday from Cape Canaveral. The spacecraft, built by Thales Alenia Space in France, is buttoned up inside the nose cone of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for liftoff during a two-hour window opening at 5:04 p.m. EDT (2104 GMT).
The 229-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket will head east after departing Florida’s Space Coast, powered by nine kerosene-fueled Merlin main engines generating 1.7 million pounds of thrust. The first stage, tail number B1073, will fly on its second mission and head for a vertical landing on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean more than 400 miles (about 670 kilometers) east of Cape Canaveral.
The upper stage’s single Merlin engine will fire two times to inject the SES 22 spacecraft into an elliptical, or oval-shaped, transfer orbit ranging more than 20,000 miles above Earth. Deployment of the SES 22 satellite from the Falcon 9 upper stage is scheduled at T+plus 33 minutes, 26 seconds, according to a mission timeline provided by SpaceX.
SES 22 will unfurl its solar panels and antennas, and perform a series of orbit-raising burns with a liquid-fueled engine to circularize its orbit at geostationary altitude over the equator. After completing in-orbit verification testing, SES 22 is scheduled to enter commercial service in early August, according to De Hauwer.
The Federal Communications Commission’s finalized a program in 2020 to clear 300 megahertz of C-band spectrum for the roll-out of 5G mobile connectivity networks.
The FCC auctioned U.S. C-band spectrum — previously used for satellite-based video broadcast services to millions of customers — to 5G operators.
In compensation for losing the spectrum, Intelsat and SES — the two largest C-band satellite operators in the U.S. market — are set to receive $4.87 billion and $3.97 billion from 5G bidders, respectively, if they can accelerate the transition of C-band services to a smaller swath of spectrum by December 2023, two years before the FCC’s mandated deadline.
Intelsat and SES — along with operators with a smaller share of the U.S. C-band market — will also be reimbursed for their C-band relocation costs, including satellite manufacturing and launch expenses, by the winners of the FCC’s C-band auction.
As part of the agreement, the satellite operators were incentivized to buy new C-band broadcasting satellites from U.S. manufacturers to operate in the 4.0 to 4.2 GHz swath of the C-band spectrum. The lower portion of the band previously allocated to satellite operators — 3.7 to 4.0 GHz — is being transitioned to 5G services.
De Hauwer said SES has already cleared the lower 120 MHz of the C-band spectrum through reallocation of programming on existing satellites, but meeting the rest of the C-band clearing mandate requires the launch of new spacecraft. In 2020, SES ordered six new C-band satellites, including a spare, and Intelsat procured seven C-band satellites.
SES says the new C-band satellites will enable the broadcast of digital TV services to nearly 120 million homes in the United States.
“We have to have more satellites in the sky so that we then spread the loading on a larger number of satellites as opposed to what we have now,” De Hauwer said. “We will launch five C-band satellites. They’re all going to be launched this year, or this is certainly the plan. With that, we’ll be good. That’s the capacity we need in the sky in order to do the repacking (of the C-band spectrum).”
After the launch of SES 22 this week, two more C-band satellites are assigned to fly to space on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in the third quarter of this year, according to De Hauwer. Sources said that mission is currently set for launch in late August or early September.
The SES 20 and 21 satellites flying on the Atlas 5 rocket were built by Boeing, and are fitted with all-electric propulsion systems. The electric thrusters are more efficient but less powerful than conventional liquid-fueled rocket engines, and would take months to reposition the SES 20 and 21 satellites from an elliptical transfer orbit into their final circular operating orbits in the geostationary belt.
The Atlas 5’s Centaur upper stage has the ability to place the SES 20 and 21 satellites very close to their operating positions in geostationary orbit.
“This rocket is the right rocket for that specific mission,” De Hauwer said. “We could not afford an orbit-raising of a number of months. Timing is everything for this program, so it has to be able to do direct injection, so the two satellites will be almost immediately in geostationary orbit and that required the Atlas 5 from ULA.”
Two more C-band satellites — SES 18 and 19 built by Northrop Grumman — will launch together on a single Falcon 9 rocket around the end of the year. Those satellites use chemical propulsion for faster orbit-raising, so they can launch into a standard elliptical transfer orbit.
Launching all the new C-band satellites quickly was a critical part of the spectrum clearing program.
“Part of our main criteria in selecting the different vendors was what will be the timeline for them to deliver the spacecraft,” De Hauwer said. “Timing is everything in this program. Once the satellites are launched, we then need to move the customers around, when the satellites are being moved, we can do the last phase of filtering.”
Thales Alenia Space built the SES 22 satellite in 22 months, De Hauwer said.
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NASA’s $30 million CAPSTONE mission lifted off Tuesday on a Rocket Lab launcher from New Zealand, departing Earth on a circuitous but fuel-efficient four-month journey toward a halo orbit around the moon to test technologies and operations for the Artemis program.
The CAPSTONE mission is modest in scale but opens a new chapter in small satellite technology and is the first new spacecraft to launch under the umbrella of the Artemis program, NASA’s effort to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.
“CAPSTONE is a pathfinder in many ways, and it will demonstrate several technology capabilities during its mission timeframe while navigating a never-before-flown orbit around the moon,” said Elwood Agasid, project manager for CAPSTONE at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
The 55-pound (25-kilogram) spacecraft took off from Rocket Lab’s commercial spaceport on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand at 5:55:52 a.m. EDT (0955:52 GMT) Tuesday, riding the company’s Electron launcher through the atmosphere on a course east over the Pacific Ocean.
Nine kerosene-fueled engines powered the 59-foot-tall (18-meter) Electron booster off the pad at Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1B on the North Island of New Zealand. The mission marked the 27th flight by Rocket Lab’s Electron launcher, and the company’s first mission heading for a destination beyond low Earth orbit.
The Electron’s second stage fired its single engine about two-and-a-half minutes into the mission, then deployed the CAPSTONE spacecraft and Lunar Photon space tug developed by Rocket Lab. The Lunar Photon power and propulsion module fired two times to begin a series of maneuvers to send the CAPSTONE mission on a trajectory toward the moon.
Here’s a replay of the liftoff of Rocket Lab’s Electron launcher from Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand with NASA’s CAPSTONE moon mission. https://t.co/vFr2H2yvef pic.twitter.com/kHgGoGnFRk
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) June 28, 2022
The first two burns by the Photon’s HyperCurie engine placed the CAPSTONE spacecraft into an orbit ranging between 137 miles (220 kilometers) and 668 miles (1,075 kilometers) above Earth. Six more burns over the next six days will gradually raise CAPSTONE’s orbit, with the final burn programmed to send the mission on its path toward lunar orbit.
Unlike the Apollo missions, which reached the moon in three-to-four days, CAPSTONE will take more than four months to reach its target orbit. But CAPSTONE’s journey is more fuel-efficient. The spacecraft will head to a point in space some 800,000 miles (1.3 million kilometers) from Earth, more than three times the distance of the moon.
The CAPSTONE spacecraft will separate from the Lunar Photon carrier about six days into the mission, then perform more course corrections with its own tiny hydrazine thrusters.
CAPSTONE stands for the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment.
At its farthest point from Earth, the sun’s gravity will exert influence on CAPSTONE’s trajectory, helping naturally guide the spacecraft back toward the moon, where the spacecraft will fire its thrusters to steer into a near rectilinear halo orbit, or NRHO.
CAPSTONE’s arrival in that orbit is timed for Nov. 13.
The halo orbit will take CAPSTONE as close as 1,000 miles (1,500 kilometers) from the moon’s North Pole and as far as 43,500 miles (70,000 kilometers) from the South Pole. Each orbit of the moon will last about six-and-a-half days, according to NASA.
The same type of orbit will be used by NASA’s Gateway mini-space station, an element of NASA’s Artemis program that will serve as a staging base and experiment platform. Astronauts will use the Gateway as a stopover between Earth and the moon.
The CAPSTONE mission will demonstrate the fine maneuvers to nudge a spacecraft into the Gateway’s orbit, which requires only small amounts of fuel to maintain. Spacecraft and lunar landers can enter and exit the orbit with low-impulse thruster burns, and a station in such an orbit will have a continuous communications link with Earth.
A station like the Gateway is needed because the Orion spacecraft, which will carry crews to and from the vicinity of the moon, does not have the ability to maneuver directly into and out of a low-altitude lunar orbit, like the Apollo spacecraft did in the 1960s and 1970s.
A lunar lander departing the Gateway’s orbit will be able to ferry astronauts to the moon’s South Pole, where scientists have discovered water ice in permanently shadowed craters.
The CAPSTONE spacecraft is about the size of a microwave oven. The mission was developed at a cost of $30 million, an unusually low budget for a project of CAPSTONE’s ambition. And the payoff could ripple across the commercial launch and small satellite industries, space science, and NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.
“Part of what makes this mission compelling, from my perspective, is how it is pushing forward our desire to increase the pace of space exploration, the expansion of commercial space capabilities, helping support not just our major human exploration program, but also helping expand the capability of small missions to reach new destinations and operate in challenging new environments,” said Chris Baker, a manager in NASA’s small spacecraft technology program.
The mission is funded by NASA, and the CAPSTONE spacecraft is owned and managed by a small Colorado company named Advanced Space. Rocket Lab is responsible for launching the mission, Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems built the spacecraft, Stellar Exploration developed CAPSTONE’s propulsion system, and Tethers Unlimited supplied radio systems.
One of the two prime objectives for the CAPSTONE mission is to demonstrate the maneuvers required to reach the unique near rectilinear halo orbit, where gravitational influences from the Earth and the moon can effect the trajectory of a spacecraft. No mission has ever flown in this specific type of orbit.
In the halo orbit, CAPSTONE will be primarily influenced by Earth’s gravity. But the tug from the moon takes over on the day the spacecraft is closest to the lunar surface.
This type of orbit “has the benefit of the low energy to get into and low energy to get out of,” Baker said. “But you are then now kind of riding this balance point between the gravitational pull of the Earth and the gravitational pull of the moon.”
Engineers want to learn about the “operational realities” of how to stay in the elongated orbit, while accounting for the ever-changing positions of the Earth and the moon, said Bradley Cheetham, CEO of Advanced Space and principal investigator for the CAPSTONE mission.
Future Artemis crew missions to the moon will travel to the halo orbit quicker than CAPSTONE, covering the quarter-million-mile distance in as few as five days, according to Nujoud Merancy, chief of the exploration mission planning office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
If the CAPSTONE mission runs into problems, Merancy said NASA will move forward with the Gateway and other elements of the Artemis program without data from the pathfinder probe.
Rocket Lab won the $10 million contract to launch the CAPSTONE mission in 2020, and originally intended to send the spacecraft aloft from a new launch site at Wallops Island, Virginia. But delays in certifying the Electron rocket’s range safety system has prevented Rocket Lab from starting service from Virginia, forcing officials to move the CAPSTONE launch to the company’s New Zealand spaceport already in operation.
The Lunar Photon tug designed to do much of CAPSTONE’s lifting is an upgraded version of the Photon platform Rocket Lab developed as an experiment platform for low Earth orbit. The Photon is an evolution of Rocket Lab’s kick stage originally built to place Electron rocket payloads into their final orbit for deployment.
“Doing a mission like this is no easy task,” said Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, which was established in New Zealand and is now based in Long Beach, California. “What I’m most excited about is we’re really, from Rocket Lab’s perspective at least, bringing a anew capability to go very far and do exciting things in deep space at a budget and a timeline that was really never seen before.”
The entire assembly of the CAPSTONE spacecraft and its Lunar Photon carrier module weighed about 660 pounds (300 kilograms) fully fueled for launch.
After reaching the moon, the CAPSTONE mission will perform experiments in collaboration with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which flies in an orbit closer to the moon. The two spacecraft will establish a radio link with each other to test a deep space navigation capability.
Satellites close to Earth use the Space Force’s GPS satellites to determine their exact position. Probes traveling to more distant destination require assistance from the ground, using radio ranging technology for navigation.
The CAPSTONE spacecraft will send a ranging tone to LRO, which will beam the signal back to CAPSTONE. Software on the CAPSTONE spacecraft will use the signal to measure the distance to LRO, and determine how the distance has changed over time. From that, the computer on CAPSTONE can estimate the spacecraft’s position.
The mission also carries a chip-scale atomic clock to assist in navigation, giving the spacecraft another source of information to estimate its position in space.
“CAPSTONE, at its core, is a flight test, and it’s a flight test of multiple capabilities,” Baker said. “We have these great onboard experiments, but the capabilities I think we’re demonstrating are well beyond just those.”
The small spacecraft also carries a camera to snap pictures of the moon, although the image-taking is not part of the primary goals for the mission.
“Why would you go to the moon without a camera, right?” Cheetham said.
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[…] unloading these payloads and putting experiments to work. NASA astronauts Barron, Tom Marshburn and Mark Vande Hei began unpacking samples from science freezers aboard NG-17 and transferred them to research racks […]
After 4 months in orbit, the @NorthropGrumman #Cygnus cargo ship has departed @Space_Station for its fiery return to Earth.
The post NG-17 Cygnus Departs Space Station, Wraps Up Four-Month Stay first appeared on AmericaSpace.
A commercial Cygnus supply ship from Northrop Grumman departed the International Space Station Tuesday, completing a four-month stay after delivering more than 8,000 pounds of cargo and boosting the research lab into a slightly higher orbit.
The Cygnus spacecraft was released from the space station’s Canadian-built robotic arm at 7:07 a.m. EDT (1107 GMT) Tuesday. Mission control delayed the release by an hour Tuesday to adjust the Cygnus spacecraft’s post-departure trajectory to be clear of space debris, and allow for improved communications with the cargo ship on its course away from the space station.
Ground teams commanded the robotic arm to release the Cygnus spacecraft. Mission control unberthed the Cygnus cargo ship from the station’s Unity module early Tuesday, then moved the robotic arm to position the departing spacecraft in the proper position for release below the orbiting research lab.
The Northrop Grumman supply freighter arrived at the space station Feb. 21, two days after launching from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia aboard an Antares rocket.
The mission is the 17th Cygnus resupply flight to the space station since 2013 under a series of commercial cargo transportation contracts with NASA. The supply delivery capability was originally developed by Orbital Sciences, now part of Northrop Grumman after a corporate acquisition in 2018.
Northrop Grumman named the Cygnus spacecraft for the NG-17 mission the “S.S. Piers Sellers” ini honor of a space shuttle astronaut and NASA climate scientist who died from cancer in 2016.
The pressurized cabin of the Cygnus spacecraft is packed with several tons of trash and other equipment no longer needed at the space station. After moving a safe distance from the complex, the Cygnus freighter will maneuver into higher orbit to deploy a CubeSat for Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The NACHOS satellite will spring out of a Nanoracks deployer mounted outside the Cygnus spacecraft, beginning a mission to demonstrate a new miniature imaging instrument to pinpoint sources of trace gases — natural emissions and air pollution generated by human activity — in the atmosphere.
The hyperspectral imager on the NACHOS mission has enough sensitivity to connect sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide to specific volcanoes, cities, neighborhoods, and individual power plants, officials said. Hyperspectral imagers were once bulky instruments that required hosting by a larger satellite, but NACHOS is the first CubeSat to carry such an imager.
Hyperspectral instruments are tuned to resolving the chemical fingerprints of molecules, in the atmosphere or on Earth’s surface.
Once the 13-pound (6-kilogram) NACHOS satellite is deployed, the Cygnus spacecraft will perform a de-orbit burn Wednesday to fall back into the atmosphere. Most of the spacecraft, and its contents, will burn up over the Pacific Ocean.
The NG-17 mission delivered more than 8,300 pounds (about 3,800 kilograms) of cargo to the space station in February, including experiments, equipment to support new power-generating solar arrays, and a trash disposal system that will allow garbage to be jettisoned out of the station’s Nanoracks commercial airlock.
Using its gimbaled main engine, the Cygnus spacecraft also nudged the International Space Station into a slightly higher orbit Saturday, in one of the mission’s final tasks before leaving the complex. The maneuver lasted 5 minutes, 1 second, and raised the station’s altitude by 0.1 miles at apogee, or its highest point, and 0.5 miles at perigee, or its lowest point.
An attempt to reboost the station’s orbit June 21 was aborted after five seconds. NASA said the June 21 reboost attempt was terminated early as a “conservative measure due to system parameters that differed from Cygnus flight operations.”
Engineers determined the parameters were acceptable, and adjusted the limits for the next reboost try Saturday.
The space station’s orbit reboost capability has been exclusively provided by Russia since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011. A Cygnus mission in 2018 tested the spacecraft’s ability to raise the station’s altitude, but the NG-17 mission was the first to employ the capability as an operational service.
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Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from Launch Complex 1B on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand carrying NASA’s small CAPSTONE mission to the moon. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
Rocket Lab’s live video webcast begins approximately 20 minutes prior to launch, and will be available on this page.
NASA and commercial companies are ready to launch a 55-pound spacecraft from New Zealand to the moon Tuesday on a pathfinder mission to scout the orbit where engineers plan to assemble a mini-space station as a waypoint for astronauts flying to and from the lunar surface.
The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, or CAPSTONE, mission is set to blast off at 5:55 a.m. EDT (0955 GMT) Tuesday from Rocket Lab’s privately-owned spaceport on the North Island of New Zealand.
An Electron rocket and Photon space tug built by Rocket Lab will haul the CAPSTONE spacecraft into orbit, and then set the probe on a course to intercept the moon later this year.
The spacecraft is about the size of a microwave oven. The mission was developed at a cost of $30 million, an unusually low budget for a project of CAPSTONE’s ambition. And the payoff could ripple across the commercial launch and small satellite industries, space science, and NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.
“Part of what makes this mission compelling, from my perspective, is how it is pushing forward our desire to increase the pace of space exploration, the expansion of commercial space capabilities, helping support not just our major human exploration program, but also helping expand the capability of small missions to reach new destinations and operate in challenging new environments,” said Chris Baker, a manager in NASA’s small spacecraft technology program.
The mission is funded by NASA, and the CAPSTONE spacecraft is owned and managed by a small Colorado company named Advanced Space. Rocket Lab is responsible for launching the mission, Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems built the spacecraft, Stellar Exploration developed CAPSTONE’s propulsion system, and Tethers Unlimited supplied radio systems.
CAPSTONE will take a circuitous, fuel-efficient path to the moon lasting more than four months. In November, the small spacecraft will slip into a special type of orbit around the moon called a near rectilinear halo orbit, or NRHO, taking CAPSTONE as close as 1,000 miles (1,500 kilometers) and as far as 43,500 miles (70,000 kilometers) from the lunar surface.
The same type of orbit will be used by NASA’s Gateway mini-space station, an element of NASA’s Artemis program that will serve as a staging base and experiment platform. Astronauts will use the Gateway as a stopover between Earth and the moon.
The CAPSTONE mission will demonstrate the fine maneuvers to nudge a spacecraft into the Gateway’s orbit, which requires only small amounts of fuel to maintain. Spacecraft and lunar landers can enter and exit the orbit with low-impulse thruster burns, and a station in such an orbit will have a continuous communications link with Earth.
A station like the Gateway is needed because the Orion spacecraft, which will carry crews to and from the vicinity of the moon, does not have the ability to maneuver directly into and out of a low-altitude lunar orbit, like the Apollo spacecraft did in the 1960s and 1970s.
A lunar lander departing the Gateway’s orbit will be able to ferry astronauts to the moon’s south pole, where scientists have discovered water ice in permanently shadowed craters.
One of the two prime objectives for the CAPSTONE mission is to demonstrate the maneuvers required to reach the unique near rectilinear halo orbit, where gravitational influences from the Earth and the moon can effect the trajectory of a spacecraft. No mission has ever flown in this specific type of orbit.
CAPSTONE, and eventually the Gateway station, will take about seven days make on lap around the moon. On six of those days, Earth’s gravity is the primary influence in spacecraft, but the tug from the moon takes over on the day the craft is closest to the lunar surface.
This type of orbit “has the benefit of the low energy to get into and low energy to get out of,” Baker said. “But you are then now kind of riding this balance point between the gravitational pull of the Earth and the gravitational pull of the moon.”
Engineers want to learn about the “operational realities” of how to stay in the elongated orbit, while accounting for the ever-changing positions of the Earth and the moon, said Bradley Cheetham, CEO of Advanced Space and principal investigator for the CAPSTONE mission.
Getting to the halo orbit is an experiment of its own.
After launching from New Zealand on an Electron booster, CAPSTONE and Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon space tug will separate from the second stage to begin a series of orbit-raising burns. The Electron will initially drop off CAPSTONE and the Lunar Photon carrier module in low Earth orbit about nine minutes after liftoff.
Two burns by the Lunar Photon tug’s liquid-fueled HyperCurie engine, itself a new technology, in the first hour of the mission will begin boosting CAPSTONE’s altitude.
The Lunar Photon engine will perform additional raising burns over the next five days, then a final HyperCurie ignition will send CAPSTONE on an course toward a point in space more than 800,000 miles (1.3 million kilometers) from Earth, more than three times the distance of the moon.
The CAPSTONE spacecraft will separate from the Lunar Photon carrier about six days into the mission, then perform more course corrections with its own tiny hydrazine thrusters.
At its farthest point from Earth, the sun’s gravity will exert influence on CAPSTONE’s trajectory, helping naturally guide the spacecraft back toward the moon, where the spacecraft will fire its thrusters to steer into the halo orbit.
If CAPSTONE launches in a window extending through late July, the mission will reach its halo orbit destination Nov. 13, about four months after launch. NASA’s Apollo missions reached the moon in three-to-four days.
The approach for CAPSTONE offers a “much more efficient transfer in terms of fuel usage, but it trades that efficiency for time,” Baker said.
The trajectory also changes as the Earth and moon shift their positions relative to one another, and the path CAPSTONE will follow can change on a daily basis, in the event of launch delays, Cheetham said.
Future Artemis crew missions to the moon will travel to the halo orbit quicker, covering the quarter-million-mile distance in as few as five days, according to Nujoud Merancy, chief of the exploration mission planning office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
If the CAPSTONE mission runs into problems, Merancy said NASA will move forward with the Gateway and other elements of the Artemis program without data from the pathfinder probe.
Rocket Lab won the $10 million contract to launch the CAPSTONE mission in 2020, and originally intended to send the spacecraft aloft from a new launch site at Wallops Island, Virginia. But delays in certifying the Electron rocket’s range safety system has prevented Rocket Lab from starting service from Virginia, forcing officials to move the CAPSTONE launch to the company’s New Zealand spaceport already in operation.
The Lunar Photon tug designed to do much of CAPSTONE’s lifting is an upgraded version of the Photon platform Rocket Lab developed as an experiment platform for low Earth orbit. The Photon is an evolution of Rocket Lab’s kick stage originally built to place Electron rocket payloads into their final orbit for deployment.
“Doing a mission like this is no easy task,” said Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, which was established in New Zealand and is now based in Long Beach, California,. “What I’m most excited about is we’re really, from Rocket Lab’s perspective at least, bringing a anew capability to go very far and do exciting things in deep space at a budget and a timeline that was really never seen before.”
After reaching the moon, the CAPSTONE mission will perform experiments in collaboration with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which flies in an orbit closer to the moon. The two spacecraft will establish a radio link with each other to test a deep space navigation capability.
Satellites close to Earth use the Space Force’s GPS satellites to determine their exact position. Probes traveling to more distant destination require assistance from the ground, using radio ranging technology for navigation.
The CAPSTONE spacecraft will send a ranging tone to LRO, which will beam the signal back to CAPSTONE. Software on the CAPSTONE spacecraft will use the signal to measure the distance to LRO, and determine how the distance has changed over time. From that, the computer on CAPSTONE can estimate the spacecraft’s position.
The mission also carries a chip-scale atomic clock to assist in navigation, giving the spacecraft another source of information to estimate its position in space.
“CAPSTONE, at its core, is a flight test, and it’s a flight test of multiple capabilities,” Baker said. “We have these great onboard experiments, but the capabilities I think we’re demonstrating are well beyond just those.”
The small spacecraft also carries a camera to snap pictures of the moon, although the image-taking is not part of the primary goals for the mission.
“Why would you go to the moon without a camera, right?” Cheetham said.
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NASA’s billion-dollar Psyche asteroid mission will not launch this year, officials confirmed Friday, after delays in completing software verification testing for the spacecraft’s guidance, navigation and control system.
Mission officials said the next opportunity to launch the mission to explore Psyche, a metal-rich asteroid, is in July 2023. An independent review panel will evaluate the next steps for the project before NASA leadership decides when, or if, the Psyche mission should continue toward launch.
After “herculean” efforts to overcome the software testing problem, NASA concluded last week that the Psyche mission will not be able to launch with acceptable risk levels during a launch period between Sept. 20 and Oct. 11, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division.
Glaze said it was an “incredibly tough decision” to ground the mission, particularly when the Psyche spacecraft is finished and already delivered to the Kennedy Space Center for final launch preparations.
“We had a tight launch period, and we have run out of time for the 2022 launch opportunity,” said Laurie Leshin, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which manages the Psyche mission.
The software for the Psyche spacecraft’s guidance, navigation, and control system was completed several months late, then engineers ran into problems configuring testbed simulators at JPL to verify all the software functions are ready for launch.
“The software for that system really needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure that the spacecraft can successfully reach Psyche,” Leshin said Friday. “The software has been delivered, but the issue is the time needed to complete testing and verification of the software.”
An independent team of experts from government, academia, and industry will present options to NASA for a path forward for Psyche, including cost assessments. NASA managers will review the findings and decide whether to continue the mission and target a new launch period, or cancel the project.
The Psyche mission is estimated to cost $985 million, including expenses for the launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket and operating costs for the cruise to Psyche. NASA said Friday it has spent $717 million on the Psyche mission to date.
NASA rarely cancels missions because of delays, but the agency has terminated projects with ballooning costs. Psyche is part of the Discovery program, a line of planetary science missions that come with cost caps.
During the review, Glaze said the NASA will evaluate the cost of the Psyche delay and possible financial impacts to other planetary science missions in development. The continuation or termination review is part of NASA’s “standard practice” when a mission has a delay or a significant cost increase, Glaze said.
NASA said in May that the software testing problems would prevent the Psyche mission from taking off at the beginning of its launch period in August, pushing back the liftoff until late September. If Psyche was able to launch this year, the mission would have reached its asteroid destination in early 2026, with the help of a gravity assist maneuver at Mars to slingshot the spacecraft into the asteroid belt.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche’s principal investigator at Arizona State University, said the next possible launch periods to reach asteroid Psyche could have the mission departing Earth in July 2023 or September 2023. There are additional launch periods available in 2024.
The Psyche mission can only launch from Earth when there is good alignment between the orbits of the planets and the asteroid target, enabling the spacecraft to make the journey through the solar system.
The launch opportunities in 2023 and 2024 would allow the spacecraft to reach Psyche in 2029 or 2030, three-to-four years later than planned. Analysts are still working on the trajectory the Psyche spacecraft could take to reach the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Aside from the planetary alignment, mission planners also want the spacecraft to arrive at the asteroid when the Psyche’s equatorial regions are well-illuminated by the sun.
“We’re so excited for this to happen, we certainly hope and trust we’ll still have our chance,” Elkins-Tanton said. “That’s what the trajectory team is doing right now, making sure that we can find these times when we arrive when the lighting is good, and I will say that we do have some very good indications that there are some excellent opportunities in 2023.”
The Psyche spacecraft was delivered to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida from JPL on April 29 for final launch processing.
“This team has worked extremely hard to overcome many challenges, but we just ran out of time on this one,” Elkins-Tanton said. “The spacecraft hardware is largely complete, and we were on track to support the 2022 launch. We have no inherent deficiencies in the design or the ability of the spacecraft to accomplish the planned mission.
“And in fact, we have no known problems with the GN&C (guidance, navigation, and control) software,” she said. “We just haven’t been able to test it. So we have today a beautiful functional spacecraft built and ready, but there is that one challenge we couldn’t overcome and launch in 2022 with confidence.”
The guidance, navigation, and control software is responsible for managing the orientation of the spacecraft, pointing thee spacecraft’s antenna toward Earth, and providing trajectory data for the craft’s solar electric propulsion system. The solar electric thrusters need to start firing about 70 days after launch, leaving little time even if officials decided to launch the mission and then finish software testing.
“We just had insufficient time to verify and validate functionality associated with the GN&C software and for fault protection, and to fix any issues that we would then find during that testing,” Elkins-Tanton said. “These are critical path items.”
Psyche, the asteroid, has an irregular shape, an average diameter of about 140 miles (226 kilometers), and is made mostly of nickel and iron metals. The NASA mission will be the first spacecraft to explore a metal-rich asteroid, which may be the leftover core of a protoplanet that began forming in the early solar system more than 4 billion years ago.
NASA selected Psyche as a Discovery-class, cost-capped interplanetary mission in 2017, alongside the Lucy asteroid explorer, which launched last year.
Psyche was assembled and tested at JPL. Maxar Technologies, a builder of commercial communications satellites, provided the spacecraft’s chassis, propulsion system, and solar panels. JPL, with extensive experience in deep space operations, provided Psyche’s flight computer, software, and parts of the communications and power systems.
NASA officials said the challenge with the software testbed for Psyche involved the unique blend of Maxar and JPL components on the mission.
The software simulator is located on the JPL campus in Southern California, and is designed to replicate functions of the Psyche spacecraft. Engineers needed to merge components from JPL and Maxar to fully test the software for the Psyche mission.
One of the problems with the software testbed involved time synchronization, preventing the software code from running smoothly, said Henry Stone, Psyche’s project manager at JPL.
Combining elements from JPL and Maxar posed “some interesting interface challenges,” Stone said. “I think the investigation going forward will help to determine if we made any fundamental misses on things in there.”
Two small spacecraft were assigned to hitch a ride to space with Psyche. NASA’s twin Janus probes, each weighing just 80 pounds (36 kilograms), will launch on the same Falcon Heavy rocket as Psyche, but will head off into the solar system to fly by separate asteroids.
With the earlier delay in Psyche’s launch from August to September, the Janus rideshare mission would have not been able to reach their original target asteroids. Glaze said the Janus team identified additional candidate asteroids to study if the mission had launched in the September-October period.
NASA will decide on a future for the Janus mission after completing the review of the next steps for Psyche. It could remain with the Psyche launch, but NASA could decide to assign Janus to a different launch. The agency has recently shifted rideshare launch assignments for other small science missions.
“I feel like we will be able to find a way, whenever we launch Janus, to reach some interesting science targets,” Glaze said. “We want to understand what’s happening with Psyche before we make any decision about what’s going to happen with Janus.”
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The post Doing Tab November: Remembering STS-4, Four Decades On first appeared on AmericaSpace.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Updated June 25 with completion of HPU hot fire test.
With a series of practice countdowns complete, NASA managers said Friday the powerful Space Launch System rocket could be ready for its first test flight in late August or early September to send an unpiloted Orion crew capsule around the moon.
NASA officials said the fourth practice countdown for the SLS moon rocket Monday achieved enough objectives to declare the rehearsals complete, allowing teams to proceed with launch preparations for the Artemis 1 test flight, the first mission of the agency’s Artemis lunar program.
“At this point, we’ve determined that we successfully completed the evaluations and the work that we intended to complete for the dress rehearsal,” said Tom Whitmeyer, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, who oversees the SLS moon rocket and Orion crew capsule programs.
The 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket will roll off its launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as soon as July 1, heading back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for a hydrogen leak repair and several previously planned tasks to ready the rocket for flight, according to Cliff Lanham, the senior vehicle operations manager for NASA’s exploration ground systems team in Florida.
The practice countdown Monday marked the first time the Artemis launch team fully loaded both stages of the SLS moon rocket with 755,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants. But engineers discovered a hydrogen leak in a quick-disconnect fitting on the bottom of the core stage, in a line that dumps excess hydrogen overboard after running through pipes to condition hardware in the engine section for flight.
The launch team reconfigured software in the countdown sequencer computer to mask the leak, allowing the countdown to continue down to T-minus 29 seconds, moments after control of the countdown handed off to the flight computers on the rocket itself. The rocket’s flight computers halted the countdown when it detected the engines were not ready for ignition, due to the hydrogen leak.
Managers hoped to run through the final 10 minutes of the countdown two times during the dress rehearsal, going as far as T-minus 9 seconds, just before the core stage’s four RS-25 main engines would ignite on launch day. Although the countdown did not get as far as officials hoped, NASA managers decided the test achieved enough goals to move on to final launch preparations.
Phil Weber, a senior technical integration manager at Kennedy, said the test Monday exercised all but 13 of 128 “command functions” engineers wanted to test during the final 10 minutes of the countdown. Most of the others have already been verified in previous testing, he said
Several other technical issues cropped up Monday, beginning with a faulty valve controller in a ground nitrogen gas system in a support facility about a mile from the pad. Technicians replaced the valve assembly, allowing the countdown to proceed after a delay of a couple hours.
Weber said there were also problems with heaters on a liquid oxygen feed line on the core stage. “They turned on, and we tried to control them, and they shut down,” Weber said.
The heaters are used to thermally condition liquid oxygen flowing into the core stage engine section. Weber said engineers believe it’s a “relatively easy” fix for the heaters, adding that the issue is likely a commanding problem, not a hardware failure.
There was also a glitch in a video playback system on the Orion spacecraft, but the launch team could have resolved that problem and continued with the countdown if it occurred on launch day, Weber said. Engineers also looked at data indicating lower-than-expected electrical resistance in a booster steering unit, but additional analysis indicated the reading was not a problem.
The moon rocket’s 4.2-mile (6.8-kilometer) rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building next week on one of NASA’s Apollo-era crawler-transporters will complete the second stay at pad 39B for the Artemis 1 launcher. The rocket previously rolled to the pad in March for three countdown rehearsals in April, which were cut short by a hydrogen leak and other ground system problems that prevented teams from filling the Space Launch System with cryogenic propellants.
After returning the SLS moon rocket to the VAB, technicals tightened a connection in a liquid hydrogen line between the mobile launch platform and the core stage’s engine section. The hydrogen leak found in April was in a different line than the leaky fitting detected Monday.
Ground teams in May also replaced a balky helium valve on the upper stage, then returned the rocket to pad 39B on June for a fourth practice countdown, or wet dress rehearsal.
Whitmeyer told reporters Friday that the completion of the countdown dress rehearsal campaign this week could allow the SLS moon rocket to be ready for launch during Launch Period 25, which opens Aug. 23 and runs through Sept. 6. “That’s still on the table,” Whitmeyer said.
Another launch period opens Sept. 19 and extends until Oct. 4, followed by three more two-week launch periods through the end of the year. Depending on when the Artemis 1 mission takes off, the Orion test flight could last roughly 26 days or as long as 42 day. The mission duration hinges on the location of the moon relative to Earth, allowing the Orion spacecraft to complete a half-orbit or one-and-a-half distant orbits around the moon.
The launch periods are constrained by a number of considerations, including the position of the moon in its orbit around Earth, limits on how long the Orion spacecraft can fly in shadow without direct sunlight on its solar arrays, and re-entry and splashdown rules, including a requirement for a daytime return to Earth to aid in recovery operations in the Pacific Ocean.
The launch windows for the Aug. 23-Sept. 6 window are posted below. Aug. 30, Aug. 31, and Sept. 1 not viable launch dates because not all of the launch window constraints are met for those days.
But there’s more work to do for the Artemis ground team before the SLS moon rocket is ready for flight.
One of the milestones not demonstrated in Monday’s rehearsal was the startup of the hydraulic power units on the SLS solid rocket boosters, which should have occurred in the final 30 seconds of the countdown to drive the booster nozzles through a gimbal steering check with their thrust vector control mechanisms.
The hydraulic power units on each booster were hot-fired early Saturday in a successful test of the steering system. Technicians will drain hydrazine fuel from the power units early next week, then move the crawler-transporter under the mobile launch platform ahead of the rocket’s return to the VAB.
Weather permitting, the rollback to the VAB should begin just after midnight local time (0400 GMT) on Friday, July 1, according to Lanham.
Once the rocket is back inside the assembly building, workers will extend 10 sets of access platforms to reach various levels of the launch vehicle, and erect an access stand to reach the leaky hydrogen line. Aside from already-planned work, technicians will replace Teflon seals on quick-disconnect fittings in the tail service mast umbilical, the connection that routes cryogenic propellants between the mobile launch platform and the SLS core stage.
Officials believe one of those seals loosened in the 4-inch quick-disconnect that started leaking during Monday’s countdown rehearsal. Weber, a manager on the Artemis ground operations team, said workers will also likely change out a similar seal on a larger 8-inch propellant fill and drain line as a pre-emptive measure.
Other work inside the VAB will include changing out an avionics box on the SLS upper stage, and a software load on the upper stage computer. The ground crew will also stow final equipment inside the pressurized cabin on the Orion spacecraft, and install flight batteries on the core stage, boosters, and second stage, Lanham said.
“Then, ultimately, we want to do our flight termination system testing, and once that’s complete, we’ll be able to perform our final inspections on all the volumes of the vehicle and do our closeouts,” Lanham said Friday.
The flight termination system consists of pyrotechnic charges on the rocket that would be fired to destroy the vehicle if it veered off course and threatened populated areas.
The ground crew inside the VAB will arm the flight termination system and perform an end-to-end test, demonstrating the ability of the Space Force’s range safety team to send a destruct command to the SLS moon rocket. The flight termination system is only certified for 20 days after completion of the test, and the rocket would need to be hauled back to the VAB to revalidate the destruct mechanisms.
According to Lanham, work on the SLS moon rocket inside the Vehicle Assembly Building will take about six to eight weeks.
Weber said the ground crew will be “hustling” to roll the rocket back to pad 39B after the flight termination system check. The rocket will need to spend 10 to 14 days on the pad before the first launch attempt, and the schedule currently shows the Artemis 1 team could fit in three launch attempts before the 20-day flight termination system certification clock expires.
If the countdown is scrubbed after tanking of the rocket begins, officials will have to wait a few days for another launch attempt, allowing time for replenish cryogenic propellant supplies at pad 39B.
Although the timeline could pave the way for a launch opportunity before the end of August, NASA officials said they are still at least a few weeks away from setting a target launch date, when they have a better idea of how long it will take to complete tasks inside the VAB.
The Space Launch System has been in development more than a decade, costing more than $20 billion to date, making it one of NASA’s costliest programs in that time. NASA plans for the second SLS/Orion flight, Artemis 2, to carry a crew of four astronauts around the moon in 2024, but that hinges on the outcome of the Artemis 1 mission later this year.
Future Artemis flights will include a commercial lunar lander — the first will be provided by SpaceX — to ferry astronauts between the Orion spacecraft and the surface of the moon.
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Following a first pass last year, the European-Japanese BepiColombo mission flew by Mercury again Thursday for a gravity assist to continue reshaping its course, setting up for a maneuver in 2025 to settle in an orbit around the planet closest to the sun.
The BepiColombo spacecraft snapped photos of Mercury during the flyby Thursday, offering scientists tantalizing glimpses of the rugged, cratered landscape the mission will observe and study later this decade.
“Mercury flyby 1 images were good, but flyby 2 images are even better,” said David Rothery of the Open University, who leads the European Space Agency’s Mercury surface and composition working group. “The images highlight many of the science goals that we can address when BepiColombo gets into orbit. I want to understand the volcanic and tectonic history of this amazing planet.”
BepiColombo’s three black-and-white monitoring cameras and several of the mission’s magnetic, plasma and particle monitoring instruments collected data during the flyby Thursday, which took the spacecraft about 120 miles (200 kilometers) from Mercury’s surface at 5:44 a.m. EDT (0944 GMT).
The robotic mission flew closest to Mercury over the nighttime part of the planet. BepiColombo’s monitoring cameras started taking pictures about give minutes after closest approach, at a range of about 500 miles (800 kilometers) from Mercury, and recorded imagery for about 40 minutes, according to ESA, which operates the mission from a control center in Darmstadt, Germany.
BepiColombo raced by Mercury at a relative velocity of nearly 16,800 mph (7.5 kilometers per second), ESA said. As the spacecraft zoomed outbound from Mercury, the monitoring cameras looked back at the planet toward the region separating day and night, where rugged topography cast long shadows across the airless landscape.
Mercury’s largest well-preserved impact basin, called Caloris basin, entered the view frame of BepiColombo’s cameras. This region was previously observed by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, which orbited Mercury from 2011 until 2015, but was not imaged by BepiColombo when it first visited Mercury last October.
While scientists were eager to analyze images and data collected during Thursday’s encounter with Mercury, the primary purpose of the flyby was to use the planet’s gravity to continue adjusting BepiColombo’s path around the sun. BepiColombo launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in 2015, then performed a gravity assist flyby with Earth and two flybys of Venus in 2020 and 2021.
The mission visited Mercury last October for the first of six encounters to gradually step down BepiColombo’s orbit around the sun, bleeding off speed to set up for a maneuver Dec. 5, 2025, to steer the spacecraft into orbit around Mercury itself.
The flyby Thursday was intended to slow BepiColombo’s velocity by about 2,900 mph (1.3 kilometers per second) relative to the sun. More Mercury flybys are scheduled in June 2023, September 2024, December 2024, and January 2025, leading up to the late 2025 arrival at Mercury to stay.
The BepiColombo mission is a joint project between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The European component is called the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Japanese element is called the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter.
The MPO and MMO elements are stacked together with a solar power and propulsion section, or transfer element, for BepiColombo’s interplanetary cruise.
The transfer module will jettison shortly before BepiColombo enters orbit around Mercury. The planetary orbiter will fire thrusters to brake into orbit, then release the Japanese spacecraft to begin its own science mission.
BepiColombo’s European-built science orbiter will map Mercury and study the planet’s geologic history, while the Japanese part of the mission will observe the solar wind’s influence on Mercury.
The European orbiter’s main high-resolution color science camera was not active during Thursday’s flyby. Its field-of-view is blocked during the cruise phase of the mission by the Japanese spacecraft, and the camera will only be able to image Mercury after final arrival in late 2025.
“Our instrument teams on both spacecraft have started receiving their science data and we’re looking forward to sharing our first insights from this flyby,” said Johannes Benkhoff, ESA’s BepiColombo project scientist. “It will be interesting to compare the data with what we collected on our first flyby, and add to this unique dataset as we build towards our main mission.”
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