A European-built satellite with the unusual shape of a building launched into orbit on Saturday on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket off the central coast of California, carrying a state-of-the-art radar altimeter to measure rising sea levels on our home planet.
The Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich observation satellite took off at 9:17:08 a.m. PST (12:17:08 pm EST; 1717: 08 GMT) on Saturday at 140 miles (225 km) north of Los Angeles from the Space Launch Complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base. In the west.
Flying south-east, the 229-foot tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket orbited the satellite on the first mission of SpaceX since June 2019.
Less than a minute and a half before the flight, cold gas thrusters were detached and fired to flip around the first stage booster of the Falcon 9 and fly before the tail. Boost-back burn and entry burn by a subset of Rocket’s Merlin engines, guided the Falcon 9 booster back to Wandenburg.
The supersonic return maneuver was carried out by the rocket’s center engine. Just before the touchdown, four landing legs were shattered, as the 15-story booster landed at Bullsey Landing at SpaceX’s rocket recovery facility at Wendenberg Air Force Base, about eight-and-a-half minutes after the lift.
Successful landing marks the third time SpaceX has returned the Falcon 9 booster to the shore landing site at Vandenberg, and the 66th recovery of the Falcon Booster overall.
The replay of the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket from SLC-4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is here with the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich oceanographic satellite.
Continuous coverage: https://t.co/dseXmjGEGn pic.twitter.com/V0Cd2cjIGx
– Now Spaceflight (Spaceflight Now) November 21, 2020
The upper phase of the rocket continued to fire its single Merlin to reach the orbit around the Earth, then ruled the engine for about 10 seconds to orbit its orbit before separating the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich satellite 58 minutes after launch.
A live video from the top of the Falcon 9 shows a 2,628-pound (1,192-kilogram) spacecraft flying rocket-free over the Indian Ocean.
The Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich satellite was built by Airbus in Germany and is the size of a small pickup truck. The Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich carries a radar altimeter, microwave radiometer and equipment to accurately locate the satellite in orbit. Working together, the devices will track sea level changes for a few centimeters.
The mission is a partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency, Umetsat and NOAA. The mission was also supported by the European Commission – the EU’s executive arm – and the French space agency CNES.
The Sentinel-6 satellite is named after Michael Freelich, the former head of NASA’s Department of Earth Sciences, who died of cancer earlier this year.
“Congratulations to everyone who made the launch of the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich Satellite possible today!” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstein tweeted. “A fitting tribute to the incredible trialblazer in earth science.”
Ground teams from the European Space Operations Center in Germany received the first signals from a new oceanographic satellite after the liftoff, when the spacecraft returned to Alaska’s ground station. The controllers confirmed that the solar panels generating its power from the satellite were expanded and the spacecraft was found to be in good condition in the first appearance health assessment.
Preliminary data show that the Falcon 9 rocket placed the satellite in orbit very close to the mission’s target 830 miles (1,336 kilometers) altitude. The launch was aimed at injecting the spacecraft into orbit at approximately 66 degrees, the same orbital plane where a predecessor oceanic satellite named Jason flies.
The Falcon 9 has landed! The brand new booster launching the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich oceanographic satellite has returned to Bullsey Landing on California’s Central Coast.
This marks the third landing of the Falcon 9 booster in Vandenberg. Https://t.co/dseXmjGEGn pic.twitter.com/gUwfqwPXsU
– Now Spaceflight (Spaceflight Now) November 21, 2020
Rising sea levels are a consequence of climate change. Data from previous satellites show that the rate of sea level rise is accelerating, mission scientists said.
Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich is at the forefront of a series of oceanographic missions aimed at sea level rise, beginning in 1992 with the US-French Topex / Poseidon mission. And Sentinel-6 A similar satellite, Sentinel-6B, named Michael Freelich, is planned to be launched in 2025 to further expand the additional data record at sea level.
Ripko Sharru, a scientist at the Sentinel-6 project in Yupetset, said the Topex / Poseidon and Jason satellites have been about an inch above the global sea level in the last 30 years. inches inches (c centimeters).
The two Sentinel-6 missions cost about 1 1 billion, and were shared equally between the US and European partner agencies, said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science mission directorate.
“This satellite is so nice that we built it twice,” said Josh Willis, a Sentinel-6 project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The record for global sea level rise actually goes back to the early 90s, Willis said. “The interesting thing is that you can see that the growth rate is really increasing. In the 90’s the sea level was rising by 2 millimeters per year. In the 2000s, it was about 3 millimeters per year, and now it’s more than 4 or 5 millimeters per year. So we’re looking at the additional cost of the surface of the sea before our eyes, and it lets us do that satellites like this. “
ESA’s Sentinel-6 mission scientist, Craig Donlon, said rising sea levels “would put large cities at risk of flooding, including New York, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo and more.” It is estimated that about 2 to 3 million more people are exposed to every 1 millimeter rise in sea level. “
Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich is the eighth satellite to depart for the European Copernicus constellation. The European Commission manages the Copernicus program, providing ESA technical expertise and coordinating the development of sentinel satellites.
The primary goal of Copernicus satellites is to collect data on the Earth’s changing atmosphere. Fleet is the most capable satellite program focused on Earth observation. Data from Sentinel satellites are distributed worldwide.
“We’ve seen evidence of this dramatic change in many different criteria and events around the world, but they all point in the same direction – the earth is cozy,” Donlon told a pre-launching news conference. “And the biggest indicator of the imbalance of this earth system is sea level rise. That is because it consolidates the total impact of global warming. This is dominated by melting of ice sheets, thermal expansion of seawater and changes in terrestrial water storage. “
The Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich spacecraft carries the European Dual Frequency Poseidon 4 radar altimeter, which transmits signals to the surface of the ocean more than 800 miles below the satellite. The receiver measures the time for the signal to bounce off the ocean and return to the satellite.
A microwave radiometer provided by NASA measures atmospheric properties that can represent the minusual effects of radar altimeter signals on travel time, allowing scientists to correct for disturbance and obtain more accurate measurements of sea surface.
The Sentinel-6 also carries devices to help determine its exact location using Michael Freelich, GPS navigation signals, Doppler measurements and laser tracking.
The satellite will measure the height of the wave by observing the roughness of the sea surface and estimate the wind speed. It will cover about 95 percent of the world’s oceans every 10 days.
The unusual shape of the spacecraft like a house is also an important factor in its performance. Engineers designed it for simplicity, and expressed the lack of its solar array wings and other structures, “said Donlon, adding that” a very stable satellite design is created, which is really important for the Satellite Altimeter mission, “Donlon said.
Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich will take its measurements with higher resolution given the increase in sea level compared to previous satellites. This means that the new satellite will be able to better see how the rising sea level is affecting the sea level.
Yumetsat will handle the regular operations of the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich for its planned five-and-a-half year mission after completing a three-day activation timeline.
Ground teams will maneuver the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich in a position to fly about 140 miles, or 230 kilometers, behind the Jason 3 satellite – which launched in 2016 – for the cost of nearly a year of cross-calibration, making sure the new spacecraft provides equally reliable data. Is. As its predecessor
After launching the Sentinel-6B in 2025, the Sentinel-6 will replace Michael Freelich, expanding the sea level rise data record until at least 2030.
SpaceX plans to re-use the first phase on a temporary basis with the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich mission on Saturday and will fly from the company’s next NASA spacecraft, Wadenberg, next July, NASA’s launch director Tim Dunne said in a recent spaceflight.
In that flight, the Falcon 9 rocket will launch NASA’s double asteroid redirection test, or dart, from Nudenburg. It marks the launch of the Falcon 9 booster, previously flown for the first time by NASA’s science mission.
The dart is scheduled to open in the window in late July 2021, allowing the probe to reach its asteroid target in late 2022. DRT will break the well-known small lunar orbiting asteroid Didimos to test deflection techniques that scientists can use to move a usable asteroid. The course of the collision with the earth.
Dunn said NASA’s Lunch Services Program, which manages procurement and preparation for NASA’s science missions, has approved a rocket reuse plan for flight-flight inspections on booster after the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich mission and for the remaining DART missions for renewal.
NASA has already approved the launch of SpaceX’s Dragon space station cargo ships on previously flown Falcon 9 boosters, and the agency plans to launch a crew Dragon astronaut mission on a reused rocket starting March 2021 with SpaceX’s next crew flight. Was.
One warning for the future of the booster is its possible use as a backup for the SpaceX Crew-2 mission in March. Kathy Ludders, head of NASA’s Human Spaceflight Directorate, said last week that the Falcon 9, the first phase of the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich mission, could be a backup of the Crew-2 launch, even if the primary rocket assigned to the astronaut mission causes problems.
NASA and SpaceX Crew-2 have agreed to use the same booster for the launch that Nov. On the 15th, Crew-1 sent a mission to the International Space Station. That phase landed in the Atlantic Ocean on a SpaceX drone ship and returned to Cape Canaveral. With the lean on Thursday it was clearly windy or slipped towards the deck of the ship in rough seas.
The booster was found to be in an otherwise good condition, and SpaceX unloaded the rocket from the drone ship to transport the hangar transport to Cape Canaveral for inspection and renovation.
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