![]() As they continue to make strides in space exploration and satellite deployment, the future of global connectivity and communication is being reshaped before our eyes. SpaceX’s commitment to regularly launching Falcon 9 rockets is a testament to their dedication in revolutionizing the space industry. By launching more Starlink satellites, the coverage and capacity of the constellation can be enhanced, ensuring a more robust and reliable internet service. It consists of thousands of small satellites that are deployed in low Earth orbit, working together to create a mesh network that can facilitate high-speed internet access from anywhere on the planet.Įach Falcon 9 mission brings SpaceX closer to achieving its ambition of providing global internet connectivity. The Starlink internet satellite constellation is a project initiated by SpaceX with the goal of providing global broadband coverage. The launch was visible from various vantage points, including Cape Canaveral and Viera, where spectators captured stunning images of the rocket ascending towards the September 23rd moon. EDT, illuminating the night sky as it soared into space. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 11:38 p.m. This mission marked the 6-18 launch of the Starlink satellites, further expanding the growing constellation in low Earth orbit. The Moon, of course, has no atmosphere for the stage to burn up in.SpaceX achieved another successful launch on Saturday, September 23rd, as their Falcon 9 rocket carrying Starlink internet satellites took off from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This is what SpaceX and most Western rocket companies customarily do to help control debris in low Earth orbit. Typically, during interplanetary missions, a rocket's upper stage is sent into a heliocentric orbit, keeping it away from the Earth and its Moon.įor launches of spacecraft intended to orbit the Earth, the best practice is to reserve enough fuel in a rocket's upper stage to return it to Earth's atmosphere, where it will burn up. ![]() It's likely that this will be the first time a piece of space hardware unintentionally strikes the Moon. The dry mass of the Falcon 9's second stage is about 4 metric tons, and it should impact the Moon at a velocity of about 2.58 km/s. SpaceX waited a day, but ended up launching the company’s 65th orbital mission of the year. Although scientists are most keen to understand the presence of ice at the lunar poles, being able to observe the subsurface material ejected by the Falcon 9 rocket's strike could still provide some valuable data. With the LCROSS mission, NASA deliberately impacted a spent rocket upper stage into the Moon in 2009 for this purpose. This information is important because it will allow satellites presently orbiting the Moon, including NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and India's Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft, to collect observations about the impact crater. But they will accumulate between now and March 4, and further observations are needed to refine the precise time and location of the impact. "These unpredictable effects are very small," Gray writes. The first stage booster, B1058, landed back on the drone ship, A. EDT (0338 UTC) from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. As the object is tumbling, it is difficult to precisely predict the effects of sunlight "pushing" on the rocket stage and thus making slight alterations to its orbit. SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket at 11:38 p.m. With this new data, Gray now believes that the Falcon 9's upper stage will very likely impact the far side of the Moon, near the equator, on March 4. According to Bill Gray, who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, asteroids, minor planets, and comets, such an impact could come in March.Įarlier this month, Gray put out a call for amateur and professional astronomers to make additional observations of the stage, which appears to be tumbling through space. The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket headed southeast from Florida’s Space Coast to haul the 56 Starlink satellites into orbit on SpaceX’s last launch of the first half of 2023. Now, according to sky observers, the spent second stage's orbit is on course to intersect with the Moon. It also lacked the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system, so it has been following a somewhat chaotic orbit since February 2015. After the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage completed a long burn to reach a transfer orbit, NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory began its journey to a Sun-Earth LaGrange point more than 1 million km from the Earth.īy that point, the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage was high enough that it did not have enough fuel to return to Earth's atmosphere. SpaceX launched its first interplanetary mission nearly seven years ago.
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