SPACE reports, “Sunday (March 2) is shaping up to be a delightful day for space explorers, as not one but two major NASA missions are expected to take to the skies — and interestingly, though the spacecraft associated with these missions are pretty different from one another, you might say they all have the same profession: cosmic cartography. Cartographer one, named PUNCH, will map the sun’s dynamics, while cartographer two, named SPHEREx, will kind of map the rest of the universe.”
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Tag: Two Missions
SpaceX Launches Two Missions in One Day
Orlando (FL) Sentinel reported that after abiding by NASA’s request “to give its Psyche mission on a Falcon Heavy launch its full attention this week, SpaceX lined up and knocked out a Falcon 9 launch just hours later on Friday.” The day “began with Falcon Heavy making its eighth ever flight lifting off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A cutting through haze and clouds at 10:19 a.m. to successfully bring to space NASA’s $700 million probe that had a six-year flight ahead of it for a rendezvous with a metal-rich asteroid also named Psyche.” Sandwiched in between Falcon Heavy’s launch pad “and its booster landing zones was the Falcon 9 rocket on Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 that had been holding off launch with its Starlink satellite payload since weather forced it to stand down last Sunday.” But with Psyche safely in space, SpaceX “was ready to go and weather stayed green for it to launch that Falcon 9 eight hours and 42 minutes later carrying another 22 Starlink internet satellites into space.”
Full Story (Orlando Sentinel)
Video
SpaceX Starlink 113 launch and Falcon 9 first stage landing, 13 October 2023
(SciNews; YouTube)
Space Force to Require Two Missions Prior to Using ULA’s Vulcan Centaur Rocket
Aviation Week reported that “despite delays with United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) new Vulcan Centaur rocket, the U.S. Space Force will require two missions prior to using the booster for national security space (NSSL) missions.”
Full Story (Aviation Week)
