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WASHINGTON – SpaceX completed its first polar launch at Cape Canaveral on August 30, delivering an Argentine radar satellite and two small satellites in low Earth orbit using a Falcon 9 rocket.
Falcon 9 took off at 7:19 pm ET from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, exceeding a 60% chance of a weather lag due to extensive cloud cover. The rocket deployed the Saocom-1B synthetic aperture radar satellite for the Argentine space agency CONAE approximately 14 minutes after liftoff, followed by the Tyvak-0172 smallsat and PlanetiQ’s Gnomes-1 commercial meteorological Smallsat approximately one hour after liftoff.
SpaceX was waiting for the launch until after the United Launch Alliance completed the Delta 4 Heavy launch of the National Reconnaissance Office’s NROL-44 satellite, also from Cape Canaveral. However, a ULA mission abort was activated three seconds before liftoff on August 29. delayed that mission for a minimum of seven days, creating an opportunity for SpaceX to launch first.
SpaceX landed the Falcon 9’s first-stage thruster on the ground at Cape Canaveral Landing Zone 1, recovering that thruster for the fourth time. The company plans to recover the rocket payload fairing halves out of the Atlantic Ocean, as SpaceX’s usual fairing recovery ships were deployed to different locations for a Starlink Falcon 9 mission, already cleared.
SpaceX was attempting to launch two Falcon 9 missions from Cape Canaveral on August 30, beginning with a batch of its own Starlink broadband satellites at 10:12 a.m. Eastern time, but inclement weather delayed that mission until at least September 1st.
SpaceX had intended to launch Saocom-1B in March, but was delayed at the request of CONAE due to the coronavirus. Synthetic aperture radar startup Capella Space planned to launch a satellite on that mission as a carpool, but switched its satellite to a dedicated flight on a Rocket Lab Electron due to that delay. Capella Space’s Sequoia satellite is scheduled to launch no earlier than August 30 at 11:05 p.m. from the Rocket Lab launch pad in New Zealand.
SpaceX’s Saocom-1B mission marks the first polar launch from Cape Canaveral since 1969.
Brig. General Doug Schiess, commander of the 45th Space Wing, which oversees the Florida space coast launch ranges, said on Aug. 25 during a video call with reporters that SpaceX requested to launch Saocom-1B on the polar path from the Cape instead. from Vandenberg Air. Force Base in California, as originally planned.
“Part of his processing was here and it made the most sense,” Schiess said.
Polar orbits are popular for meteorological and remote sensing satellites to allow coverage of the entire surface of the Earth. SpaceX launched the first Saocom satellite, Saocom-1A, into polar orbit from Vandenberg in October 2018 on a Falcon 9.
The August 30 launch of Saocom-1B completes Argentina’s Saocom system, comprised of twin 3,000 kilogram satellites equipped with L-band phased array antennas that can image day and night and through clouds.
Saocom satellites are designed to detect soil moisture and strengthen Argentina’s agricultural sector.
CONAE signed its launch contract with SpaceX for the Saocom satellites in 2009, for the planned launches in 2012 and 2013, but the Saocom program experienced setbacks that prevented it from meeting those launch targets.
In an interview, Raúl Kulichevsky, CONAE’s technical director, said that Saocom satellites proved more difficult to build than expected for INVAP, Argentina’s state-owned satellite manufacturer, as the company had never built a radar satellite before.
“It was a more challenging mission than we expected at the beginning,” he said.
The Saocom satellites collectively cost $ 600 million, covering manufacturing, two Falcon 9 launches and a new ground station, Kulichevsky said. Funding the program was also difficult at times, he said.
The Argentine government, which tried to avoid a default on its growing national debt during the 2010s, did not always fund the Saocom program “exactly when we needed it,” Kulichevsky said.
One of the most challenging technical parts of the program was building an L-band phased array antenna for each satellite, Kulichevsky said. CONAE was in charge of antenna development and partnered with Argentina’s National Atomic Energy Commission to work together on the element.
“They have a very strong research and development branch in materials,” Kulichevsky said of the National Atomic Energy Commission. “When we started designing the antenna, we signed an agreement with them” to test new materials and evaluate the mechanics of some components.
Gabriel Cristian Absi, vice president of INVAP’s aerospace division, said that radar images collected from Saocom-1A show that the antenna is working as expected.
“The quality of the image we got with the Saocom-1A is very amazing,” he said. “There are many companies and government organizations [entities] in Argentina who are very interested in the information that Saocom can provide them ”.
Absi said that INVAP will seek to sell synthetic aperture radar satellites outside Argentina to maintain its knowledge of how to build such satellites. He said government customers are interested in X-band synthetic aperture radar satellites for border defense and surveillance applications.
In addition to domestic use, Argentina uses Saocom satellites as part of the Italian / Argentine satellite system for emergency management, or SIASGE, which combines CONAE’s two Saocom satellites and Italy’s four first-generation Cosmo-Skymed satellites, allowing for faster image collection of fires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.
