The joint NASA-European ocean surveillance satellite named Jason-3 is poised for blastoff from SpaceX’s California launch pad on Sunday, Jan. 17 – followed immediately by another Falcon 9 rocket recovery landing on a barge at sea.
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On Sunday, SpaceX’s Falcon booster successfully lifted the Jason-3 satellite into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Nailing the landing is huge for SpaceX and space travel as a whole because Musk has previously said he believes reusing rockets – which cost as much as a commercial airplane – could reduce the cost of access to space by a factor of one hundred. The primary goal of the launch was to boost the Jason-3 satellite into orbit for NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the French space agency CNES and EUMETSAT, the European agency that manages weather satellite data.
The Jason-3 is created to measure sea level variations and changes to the ocean’s topography, helping teh agencies better predict hurricanes and severe weather. If successful, the Jason 3 satellite will continue more than two decades of sea level measurements.
This was the third time the Hawthorne-based company failed to accomplish a clean sea landing, although the company brought a Falcon rocket stage back to terra firma at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on December 21 in what many hailed as an engineering feat.
“As we touched down it was a slightly harder landing than we expected and it looks like one of the landing legs may have broken as we touched down on the drone ship”, Spacex lead mechanical design engineer John Federspiel said. Touchdown speed was ok, but a leg lockout didn’t latch, so it tipped over after landing.
Musk has said he hopes to make a sea landing on the robotic barge work because it would save fuel – ships can move – and it would remove landings away from where people work and live. As Musk said, however, this won’t be the last drone ship landing attempt we’ll see.
Definitely harder to land on a ship.
Fifty five minutes after liftoff, the second stage briefly fired again and one minute later the Jason-3 satellite deployed.
The 550kg Jason-3 satellite was the fourth in a series of ocean-monitoring satellites, which were taking centre stage in monitoring Earth’s climate.
It will join, and ultimately replace, Jason-2, which has been in orbit since 2008. It has more than 60 launches on its schedule, worth more than $8 billion.
Hans Koenigsmann, vice-president of mission assurance for SpaceX, said previously that the current rocket would have been able to return to land, but the company does not have environmental approval at Vandenberg yet.
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Jason-3 entered orbit about 15 miles (25 kilometers) below Jason-2. Together, the two spacecraft will double global data coverage. SpaceX is vying for NASA contracts to supply rocket launching services.
