SpaceX first tested the ability of the Falcon 9 to touch down its landing legs on a barge a year ago.
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“Jason-3 will take the pulse of our changing planet by gathering environmental intelligence from the world’s oceans”, said Stephen Volz, assistant administrator for NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service.
A video posted to Instagram by Musk showed the rocket falling over and breaking apart in a fireball, and a photo released by SpaceX showed wreckage strewn across the platform positioned about 170 miles (280 kilometers) south of Vandenberg in the Pacific Ocean. Companies like SpaceX that make rockets are working to flawless landing the rocket safely so they can be reused.
The primary goal of the launch was apparently achieved, as the Jason 3 weather satellite was successfully tracked in low Earth orbit, according to video feeds from space.
[Satnews] The Jason-3 high-precision ocean altimetry satellite was successfully launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 19:42 CET (10:42 California time) on a Falcon 9 launcher procured by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as the acquisition agent for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), on Sunday, January 17, 2016. But SpaceX has wanted to ideal the landing-at-sea technique, despite the vast technical challenges of trying to slow a rocket traveling roughly 5,000 miles per hour and land it on a platform bobbing in the Pacific Ocean.
Last month SpaceX made history when it landed the Falcon 9 on dry ground at Cape Canaveral, Florida; however, its attempts at sea have been a failure so far.
“Touchdown speed was OK, but a leg lockout didn’t latch, so it tipped over after landing, ” Musk tweeted on Sunday. “Unfortunately we are not standing upright on a drone ship”. SpaceX said that the landing came in hard, and it appears that the seas were more choppy than anticipated.
The flight mission features the $180-million Jason-3 satellite, a newest member in a series of Earth-observing satellites created to provide worldwide observations of global sea levels. “Jason-3 satellite has been deployed”. Other pragmatic uses include measuring global sea level rise, and forecasting the strength of hurricanes, other severe weather and ocean conditions for the shipping industry and in response to oil spills.
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SpaceX said the rocket landed within 1.3m of the droneship’s centre.
