SpaceX is set to launch a commercial communications satellite into orbit with an NASA Earth science instrument aboard for the ride early Friday (April 7) and you can watch live online.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 12:29 a.m. EDT (0429 GMT), aiming to send the Intelsat 40e satellite into geostationary transfer orbit.
You can watch the launch live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company on its YouTube channel (opens in new tab). The webcast should begin about 15 minutes before liftoff.
SpaceX has a nearly two-hour window in which to launch the Intelsat mission. The Falcon 9 rocket booster on this flight is making its fourth flight and is expected to land on the company’s drone ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean about 8 minutes after liftoff.
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Intelsat 40e is an advanced geostationary satellite which will provide high-throughput connectivity to the company’s government and enterprise customers across North and Central America.
The satellite, developed by Colorado-based Maxar Technologies, also carries NASA’sTropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) as a hosted payload.
Intelsat 40e will settle at 91 degrees West in a geostationary orbit (GEO), about 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth’s equator. From there the satellite will perform its main communications role, but also allow TEMPO to take hourly snapshots of air pollution over North America.
Spacecraft in geostationary orbit effectively appear in a fixed position over the Earth, whereas those in low Earth orbits complete around 16 orbits every 24 hours, and may only pass over a certain area once every day.
TEMPO measures ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light spectra to detect levels of key pollutants including ozone in the lower troposphere, formaldehyde and nitrogen dioxide.
“We have several other missions that make observations of atmospheric constituents and atmospheric composition,” Karen St. Germain, Earth Science Division director at NASA’s headquarters, said during an April 5 press briefing with reporters. “The real unique difference here with tempo is going to be that geostationary look.” It will also provide much higher resolution data than other missions, St. Germain added.
TEMPO was developed by Ball Aerospace and has a primary mission of 20 months, but could go on working beyond this. Intelsat 40e itself carries two large solar arrays to provide power and is designed to operate for at least 15 years.
The hosted payload approach was hailed by both Maxar and NASA officials during the media call.
“The TEMPO program really is a win-win-win for the major entities involved,” said Aaron Abell, TEMPO project manager at Maxar. “It allows unused capacity on Maxar’s heritage satellite designed to be leveraged for government missions. This reduces the cost of access to space for the government as well as reduces the cost for Intelsat as they’re compensated for their support of the TEMPO mission.”
“The total cost to NASA is approximately $210 million,” said Kevin Daugherty, TEMPO project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center. “Of that just over $90 million was for the instrument development itself. And the remainder has been for both paying our contractors for the hosting TEMPO and then integration but as well as some support engineering and management that’s been going on.”
Daugherty added that NASA was working on a “lessons learned session” to look at how best to implement and approach such partnerships with commercial actors in the future.
The launch meanwhile will be SpaceX’s 23rd launch of the year and mark its 184th orbital rocket landing.
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