Satellites

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket blasting off in its Space Test Program-2 (STP-2) mission (Photo NASA/Joel Kowsky)

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A few hours ago SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral on a mission involving the launch of various satellites in low and medium Earth orbit. The most powerful rocket in business launched satellites on behalf of NASA, the US Air Force and other entities, incuding CubeSat-class nanosatellites built by students. The mission required four burns for the Falcon Heavy rocket’s upper stage to place them in the various orbits required. The mass of the payloads to be taken into orbit was relatively small – around 3,700 kg – but the second stage needed a lot of fuel to carry out all the maneuvers required in this mission, therefore the initial thrust of the Falcon Heavy was needed.

60 Starlink satellites blasting off a Falcon 9 rocket (Image courtesy SpaceX)

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A few hours ago 60 satellites of the Starlink constellation were launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. After just over an hour they were successfully deployed into their orbit at an altitude of about 440 kilometers all together and then started slowly disperse. This is SpaceX’s first mission to put the Starlink constellation into orbit to provide a global Internet connection coverage.

The OCO satellite blasting off atop a Taurus XL rocket (Photo NASA)

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NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP) announced the conclusions of a long investigation into the failure in the launch of its OCO and Glory satellites in 2009 and 2011. In both cases, the fairing on top of the rockets that protected the satellites didn’t separate and the extra weight caused the the satellites to fall down. The investigations revealed falsifications by the contractor Sapa Profiles, Inc. (SPI) that provided defective materials with false certifications. The investigation involved the US Department of Justice.

The Falcon Heavy blasting off carrying the Arabsat-6A satellite (Photo courtesy SpaceX)

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It was afternoon in Florida when SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral on its first commercial mission. The most powerful rocket in activity launched the Arabsat-6A satellite, which after about 34 minutes separated from the rocket’s last stage entering a transit orbit from where it started the maneuvers that will take it towards a geostationary orbit within a bit more than two weeks.

GomX-4B (Image ESA–G. Porter, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

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ESA has announced the success of the mission of its GomX-4B nanosatellite in testing new miniaturized technologies that allow really tiny satellites to navigate in space thanks to tiny liquid butane propellers and the positioning system called star tracker to use instruments such as HyperScout, a hyperspectral camera. So far, CubeSat nanosatellites were normally devoid of propulsion systems so this one opens a new era by proving that there are cases in which a shoebox-sized satellite can do the job that until now was the prerogative of satellites hundreds of times more massive with enormously lower costs.