SpaceX has released incredible footage of its most recent Falcon 9 launches and landings, including unprecedented onboard audio dio from the rocket through all stages of flight.
The rocket in question, the Falcon 9 Booster B1059, ended a month-long delay when it went long on the last gust 30, sending a new upper phase, payload fairing, and an Argentine Earth observation satellite into orbit. Known as SAOCOM 1B, a pair of artificial hole radar satellites launched by SpaceX are deployed from the Falcon 9 in less than 15 minutes after the second liftoff, followed by two rideshare payloads approximately 45 minutes later.
The Booster B1059 diverged from the rest of the Falcon 9 just minutes after launch and quickly turned to burn the boostback – quite literally slowed down from Mach 5 to zero and then advanced a few dozen miles back along the Florida coast. The rocket finished the fourth launch with a light landing at Landing Zone-1, effectively completing the sound 200 km (~ 120 miles) air travel at a significantly faster speed than the speed of sound in less than eight minutes.
In Booster Camera Video SpaceX, which is unexpectedly released after the end of the mission, one thing stands out in all respects: the uninterrupted audio dio recording of the rocket from the elevator to the landing. In the past, SpaceX has occasionally released bizarre video from a Falcon 9 booster’s boardboard camera, the most recent example of which was released in 2016. In another memorable case, SpaceX’s April 2018 NASA’s TSS Exoplanet Observatory was blessed with a loan-free booster camera footage during a live webcast. SpaceX never released that footage technically on its own, but it was so easy to cut it from a webcast to offer a clean, uninterrupted view of the Falcon 9 booster launching and landing.
SpaceX never included audio dio, regardless of all previous examples and webcasts with booster camera footage. It is generally understood that most modern launch vehicles – including the Falcon 9 – are equipped with many high fidelity microphones. Passively, multiple separate, time-synchronized record Dio recordings can be used quite literally as a source of rocket hardware issues in the event of a failure – one of SpaceX’s technologies used to its advantage in investigating Falcon 9’s first in-flight failure in 2015.
In this case, the audio Dio serves no technical purpose, but gives the Falcon 9 projection the best bird-ear vision ever released. Approximately scattered by the factor of four, the passenger jet-esque wine of SpaceX’s SOcom 1B audio Dio Falcon 9, the brief silence of the engine cut-off fun, the whistle and vibration of the atmospheric reentry, the cold-gas. The attitude of the rocket into the vacuum, and even a part of the landing leg deployment, among many other notable sounds.
Thanks to the relatively soft and low energy landing landing by Saocom 1B as a result of low Earth orbit, the Falcon 9B 1059 will probably be rotated for a fifth launch and landing in the near future. The booster may also have a shot at breaking SpaceX’s rocket turnaround record – currently caught by the Falcon 9B1058 with two launches just 51 days apart.
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