LAS VEGAS — A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched a NASA space science mission and several other smallsats July 23 after a one-day delay.
The Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 2:13 p.m. Eastern. The rocket’s upper stage deployed seven spacecraft into sun-synchronous orbits starting 54 minutes after liftoff and concluding 50 minutes later. The rocket’s booster, on its 16th flight, landed back at Vandenberg.
The launch was previously scheduled for July 22 but scrubbed less than a minute before liftoff because of what SpaceX said was “FAA airspace concerns that created a no-go condition for launch.” The Federal Aviation Administration later stated that a power outage in Santa Barbara, California, affected communications at its Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center, which manages air traffic over the Pacific. The FAA halted the launch “to ensure the safety of the traveling public.”
The primary payload for the launch was Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, or TRACERS, a NASA small Explorer heliophysics mission. TRACERS features two smallsats, built by Millennium Space Systems and weighing about 200 kilograms each.
The purpose of TRACERS is to measure how the solar wind couples with the Earth’s magnetic field. “When those systems couple, you dump mass, energy and momentum into the Earth system,” said David Miles, principal investigator for TRACERS at the University of Iowa, during a July 17 briefing. That is the “primary driver,” he said, of space weather phenomena.
TRACERS is designed to study how that coupling changes in space and time. The two spacecraft will pass through the same region of space between 10 and 120 seconds apart. “That gives us two closely spaced measurements to allow us to pick apart, is something accelerating, going down, moving around, turning on or turning off,” he said.
NASA selected TRACERS for development in 2019. The mission has a total cost of $170 million.
Several other NASA-sponsored satellites were also on the launch. Athena EPIC, or Economical Payload Integration Cost, is a smallsat featuring contributions from NASA, the U.S. Space Force and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It will test a modular satellite architecture developed by NovaWurks and carries an instrument to measure longwave infrared radiation emitted by the Earth to understand the atmosphere’s energy balance.
The mission will study more cost-effective ways to obtain that data that previous instruments, known as CERES, have collected on various spacecraft since the late 1990s. “Athena is not about a new approach to making these observations but rather reimagining the way we fly these critical instruments,” said Kory Priestley, principal investigator for Athena EPIC at NASA’s Langley Research Center, at the briefing.
A NASA payload called Polylingual Experimental Terminal, or PExT, flew on the Bard spacecraft built by York Space Systems on this launch. It will test the ability of the terminal to communicate with NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) as well as O3b mPower satellites operated by SES and the Global Xpress system operated by Viasat.
“That mission’s goal is to bring seamless, uninterrupted connectivity to our next generation of space missions,” said Greg Heckler, deputy program manager for capability development in NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation division. NASA plans to gradually phase out TDRS and rely on commercial communications services.
Also on the launch was Relativistic Electron Atmospheric Loss (REAL), a 3U cubesat that will study how electrons from the Earth’s radiation belts are scattered as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The cubesat was primarily built by students and early-career engineers at Montana State University.
Robyn Millan, principal investigator for REAL at Dartmouth College, said REAL may be able to work in tandem with TRACERS. “We’ve already started thinking about some of the science synergies that we could get by combining our data,” she said at the briefing.
The launch also carried two other payloads. Skykraft 4 is part of a constellation being developed by Australian company Skykraft to provide tracking and communications services for air traffic management. LIDE is a cubesat built by Tyvak International to test 5G communications services from space, under a project funded by the European Space Agency.
TRACERS was launched under a task order awarded to SpaceX in September 2023 as part of the agency’s Venture Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract. NASA said at the time that TRACERS would be the primary payload of a rideshare mission going to sun-synchronous orbit, but did not disclose the other payloads.
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