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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — SpaceX’s Falcon 9 carried a NASA Earth science satellite into orbit Feb. 8 in the U.S. government’s first launch in more than 60 years.
Falcon 9 launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 1:33 a.m. ET after a two-day delay due to high winds. It was placed into sun-synchronous orbit by NASA’s Plankton, Aerosols, Clouds, and Ocean Ecosystems, or PACE, spacecraft.
PACE carries instruments to study both the color of the ocean as a means of monitoring atmospheric clouds and aerosols, as well as biological activity such as phytoplankton. The mission, developed at Maryland’s Goddard Space Flight Center at a total cost of $964 million in contingency funds, is designed to last three years, but scientists believe it will last at least 10 years. We expect it to be operational.
“In many ways, we know more about the moon’s surface than we do about our own oceans,” Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division, said at a Feb. 5 pre-launch briefing. I know it very well,” he said. “PACE will be the most advanced mission we have ever launched to study marine biology.”
PACE project scientist Jeremy Weldel said during a Feb. 4 briefing that scientists began planning what would become PACE 20 years ago, and the mission had been in development for nine years. PACE had to survive several attempts by the Trump administration to cancel the mission, each time the cuts were rejected by Congress.
“One of the reasons we are sitting here today is because we had such a large stakeholder community that understood the potential impact of PACE and supported us moving forward,” Saint-Germain said in February. stated on the 4th.
Tim Dunn, senior launch director for NASA’s Launch Services Program, said in a Feb. 5 briefing that PACE is the first U.S. government mission to launch into polar or sun-synchronous orbit from Florida since 1960. said. There were several such launches from the Cape in the early Space Age, but they were canceled after a November 1960 launch failure that caused debris to fall on Cuba.
In 2020, SpaceX won permission from the Eastern Mountains to launch Falcon 9 aircraft in southern orbit, accessing polar orbit. Dunn credited SpaceX’s use of autonomous flight safety systems and the first stage’s ability to land on the droneship or return to the Cape to make the launch into polar orbit possible. During the PACE launch, the booster touched down in Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral.
Before PACE, SpaceX conducted 11 Falcon 9 launches from Cape Canaveral to polar orbit for other customers, including its own transporter rideshare missions. “There is no question that this is a well-thought-out process that we have in place,” he said.
While most polar launches still take place from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, SpaceX commercial satellite mission director Juliana Shaiman said the PACE mission called for a launch from Cape Canaveral instead. Ta. “The spacecraft team from Goddard preferred to launch closer to the center. Florida is much closer to Goddard than California, so here we are,” she said on February 5.
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