Rocket Lab will launch an Earth-observing radar satellite for the corporate Capella Space early Sunday morning (July 30), and you may watch the motion live.
An Electron rocket carrying one among Capella Space’s “Acadia” satellites is scheduled to lift off from Rocket Lab’s Recent Zealand site Sunday during a two-hour window that opens at 1 a.m. EDT (0500 GMT; 5 p.m. local Recent Zealand time).
Watch the liftoff live here at Space.com, courtesy of Rocket Lab, or directly via the corporate. Coverage is predicted to start about 20 minutes before launch.
Related: Rocket Lab launches 1st Electron booster from US soil in twilight liftoff
Sunday morning’s launch shall be Rocket Lab’s eighth of 2023 and the corporate’s fortieth overall. All of those missions have involved Electron, a 59-foot-tall (18 meters) rocket designed to present small satellites dedicated rides to orbit (and beyond; an Electron launched the CAPSTONE moon mission in June 2022).
Rocket Lab calls the approaching mission “We Love the Nightlife,” an apparent reference to the power of Capella Space’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites to capture imagery when and where the sun doesn’t shine.
“Capella’s advanced radar technology penetrates all weather conditions — clouds, fog, smoke, rain — and captures clear imagery day and night, providing unparalleled insight into what is going on anywhere on the globe at any given moment,” Rocket Lab wrote within the mission’s press kit, which you will discover here.
“We Love the Nightlife” shall be Rocket Lab’s third mission for Capella Space, and the primary of 4 planned launches to deliver Acadia satellites to orbit for the San Francisco-based company.
“The subsequent-generation Acadia satellites include several recent features that can enable faster downlink speeds and even higher-quality images for fast, reliable insights which can be easily accessible through Capella’s fully automated ordering and delivery platform,” Rocket Lab wrote within the press kit.
If all goes in accordance with plan on Sunday morning, the Acadia spacecraft shall be deployed right into a circular orbit 398 miles (640 kilometers) above Earth 57.5 minutes after liftoff.
Rocket Lab is working to make Electron’s first stage reusable. To this end, the corporate has recovered Electron boosters on a handful of missions up to now, including its most up-to-date one, “Baby Come Back,” which launched on July 17.
But there shall be no such recovery operations on “We Love the Nightlife,” Rocket Lab representatives said in an emailed update on Thursday (July 27).