Rocket Lab goals to bounce back tonight (Dec. 14) from a launch failure.
The corporate’s Electron rocket is scheduled to lift off from Recent Zealand during a two-hour window that opens tonight at 11 p.m. EST (0400 GMT and 5 p.m. Recent Zealand time on Dec. 15), carrying a satellite for the Japanese Earth-imaging company iQPS to orbit.
You possibly can watch the launch live here at Space.com courtesy of Rocket Lab, or directly via the corporate. Coverage is predicted to start 20 minutes before the launch window opens.
Related: September launch failure likely attributable to ‘electrical arc,’ Rocket Lab says
It’s going to be Rocket Lab’s first launch since Sept. 19. Electron suffered an anomaly about 2.5 minutes into flight that day, leading to the lack of one in every of San Francisco company Capella Space’s Earth-observing satellites.
Rocket Lab soon traced the issue to an unwanted “electrical arc,” which shorted out the battery packs that provide power to the 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron’s second stage. The corporate says it has implemented multiple corrective measures, including an enhanced testing regime here on Earth, to make sure the problem doesn’t crop up again.
Tonight’s mission, which Rocket Lab calls “The Moon God Awakens,” will deliver iQPS’ QPS-SAR-5 satellite to a circular orbit 357 miles (575 kilometers) above Earth, where it’ll join the QPS-SAR-6 craft. (QPS-SAR-5 is known as Tsukoyomi-1 after the Japanese god of the moon, which explains Rocket Lab’s mission moniker.)
“iQPS’s satellites are small, high-performance SAR [synthetic aperture radar] satellites that use a light-weight, large, stowable antenna to gather high-resolution images of Earth, even through clouds and hostile weather conditions,” Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description. “Ultimately, the iQPS constellation is planned to have 36 satellites able to monitoring specific fixed points on Earth every 10 minutes.”
Payload integration is complete for our forty second Electron launch! We’ve got a final step to clear before launch day – completing a wet dress rehearsal to verify all systems are ready for lift-off. As such, we’re currently targeting no sooner than 13 Dec NZT for the launch of The… pic.twitter.com/0dz60wkxrwNovember 26, 2023
Tonight’s launch might be the forty second thus far for the Electron, which supplies small satellites dedicated rides to Earth orbit and beyond. (An Electron launched the CAPSTONE cubesat toward the moon in June 2022, and Rocket Lab goals to launch a non-public life-hunting mission to Venus in 2024.)
Before September’s anomaly, essentially the most recent Rocket Lab mishap occurred in May 2021, when an Electron suffered an issue with its second stage.