NASA has lost two satellites designed to track hurricanes after the rocket carrying them failed to function properly.
The cause has yet to be revealed, but a live broadcast showed that the Astra launch vehicle successfully left Cape Canaveral in Florida before suffering a second-stage crash hundreds of miles into the sky.
This is the second time that the private space company Astra has lost NASA satellites.
In February, its chief executive said he was “deeply saddened” after his company accidentally destroyed four small NASA satellites in a failed launch.
Astra had successfully reached orbit in another launch a month after its February incident.
The two CubeSats aboard Sunday’s launch, which included a third of a $ 30 million mission designed to control dangerous weather on Earth, were lost.
“We had a nominal first-stage flight; however, the upper-stage engine soon shut down and we didn’t deliver our payloads into orbit,” said Amanda Dark Frye, Astra’s senior director.
The company tweeted its grief over the loss of miniature satellites.
The satellites were part of NASA’s TROPICS mission: an easy-to-say acronym that means the structure of observations resolved in times of precipitation and the intensity of the storm with a constellation of small satellites.
In a statement, NASA said: “Although we are disappointed with the loss of the two CubeSats TROPICS, the mission is part of NASA’s Earth Adventure Program, which offers opportunities for lower-cost missions and more. risk
“Despite the loss of the first two of the six satellites, the constellation TROPICS will still meet its scientific objectives with the remaining four CubeSats distributed in two orbits.”
“With four satellites, TROPICS will still provide improved weather-resolved tropical cyclone observations compared to traditional observation methods,” the US space agency added.
What are CubeSats?
“CubeSats are playing an increasingly important role in exploration, technology demonstrations, scientific research and educational research at NASA,” the company said.
During the pandemic, when access to NASA facilities was being restricted, space agency staff had commanded their CubeSat hyper-angular rainbow polarimeter from home.
TROPICS is what NASA calls “a business mission to Earth,” meaning it is a “scientifically selected, competitively selected, low-cost mission” that provided the space agency with the opportunity to invest in innovative Earth sciences.
The failed February launch carried four small satellites as part of NASA’s ELaNa 41 (Educational Nanosatellite Launch) mission, instead of TROPICS.
NASA describes ELaNa as “an exciting initiative … to attract and retain students in science, technology, engineering and math.”
The goal is to create small unit satellites that measure only 10 cm in the cube, although the satellites can be made up of two, three, or six units, each weighing less than 1.33 kg. NASA.
Three of the lost satellites were made by universities, while one was made by NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
All CubeSats released as part of the program are experimental rather than commercial.