SpaceX launched a commercial communications satellite into orbit with NASA’s Earth science instrument on board early Friday (April 7) morning.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Space Force Station Cape Canaveral in Florida at 12:30 a.m. EDT (0430 GMT), carrying the Intelsat 40e satellite toward geostationary transfer orbit.
The first stage of the Falcon 9 was to make its fourth flight, and it will likely be launched again in the future; The booster successfully landed the company’s drone ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean less than nine minutes after takeoff.
Meanwhile, the Intelsat 40e rocket’s upper stage deployed on schedule, about 32.5 minutes after launch.
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Intelsat 40e is an advanced geostationary satellite that will provide high-throughput communication to corporate government and enterprise customers throughout North and Central America.
The satellite, developed by Colorado-based Maxar Technologies, also carries NASA’s Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) as a hosted payload.
Intelsat 40e will rest 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 at a fixed location above the Earth, while vehicles in low Earth orbit complete about 16 orbits every 24 hours, and may only pass over a certain area once each day.
TEMPO will measure ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared spectra in order to detect levels of major pollutants including ozone in the lower troposphere, formaldehyde and nitrogen dioxide.
“We have several other missions that are observing atmospheric composition and atmospheric composition,” Karen St. Germain, director of the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters, said during an April 5 press conference with reporters. “The real unique difference here with TEMPO will be that geostationary look.”
It will also provide much higher resolution data than other missions, Saint-Germain added.
TEMPO was developed by Ball Aerospace and has a basic mission of 20 months, but can continue to operate after that. The Intelsat 40e carries two large solar arrays to provide energy and is designed to operate for at least 15 years.
Both Maxar and NASA officials praised the hosted payload approach during the media call.
“The TEMPO program is truly a win-win for the principal entities involved,” said Aaron Abel, TEMPO Project Manager at Maxar. “It allows unused capacity in Maxar’s legacy satellite design to be utilized for government missions. This reduces the cost of access to space for the government as well as lowers the cost of Intelsat, as they are compensated for their support of the TEMPO mission.”
“The total cost to NASA is about $210 million,” said Kevin Dougherty, TEMPO project manager at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia. “Of that, just over $90 million was to develop the hardware itself. The rest was to both pay our contractors to host TEMPO and then the integration, but in addition to some of the support engineering and management that was going on.”
Dougherty added that NASA is working on a “lessons learned session” to consider how best to implement and engage with such partnerships with commercial players in the future.
SpaceX’s Friday launch was the 23rd of the year, and the Falcon 9 landing was the company’s 184th orbital landing overall so far.
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