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  • 8 hours ago
A SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage deployed NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), Carruthers Geocorona Observatory (CGO) and NOAA's Space Weather Follow-on (SWFO-L1) spacecraft shortly after launch.

Credit: SpaceX/NASA | edited by Space.com's Steve Spaleta
Transcript
00:00So you can see there in the image right there, IMAP is spinning up.
00:02There we go. That's that four revolutions per minute we were talking about.
00:06That is not something that is wrong. That is intentional.
00:09You're looking forward. Any moment now, we could have separation of the IMAP spacecraft.
00:15That is a pretty cool image right there.
00:17IMAP deploy confirmed.
00:19There we go. IMAP has separated, beginning its mission to map to the solar frontier
00:24and reveal how the sun shapes our space environment.
00:27Go IMAP.
00:32You spin me right round, baby, right round.
00:35Like a record baby, right round.
00:37Yeah, there you go.
00:39That's a great view.
00:40It is. It's a great view.
00:42But the primary reason we do need to spin stabilized, though, too,
00:45besides the angular momentum reasons, right, is it gives us when we're spinning,
00:50we get that full 360-degree view of the medium that is trying to study.
00:54So very, very important there.
00:56Now, the second stage has already arrested that spin or stopped the spin.
01:01Because the other two spacecraft do not need to be spinning.
01:04But IMAP is on its way with that ever-important spin.
01:08Now we've got another couple of big milestones happening.
01:12We should get acquisition of signal.
01:14We have a live camera at the location where we expect to see a big celebration.
01:21This would be the IMAP Mission Operations Center at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
01:27Their team there is looking now for the acquisition of signal.
01:32And there they are.
01:33We heard earlier that they had a lock on signal for the second stage in Hawaii.
01:42So their expectation is that we should get that AOS pretty quickly.
01:47You're looking at a view at the remaining spacecraft on the stack, which is the SWIFT OL-1 and Carruthers.
02:02Because IMAP is currently running an autonomous sequence.
02:10So it's spring-loaded.
02:12As soon as it came off the spacecraft, it started running an operation.
02:17Correct.
02:18Yeah.
02:18So they have all these commands already pre-loaded in there.
02:21And so they're going through now probably their health checks, autonomous health checks,
02:25and also trying to dial or phone home in ET parlance.
02:28So we're still just waiting for the acquisition of signal, which is very, very important,
02:32because we don't have a spacecraft, unfortunately, if we don't have an acquisition of signal.
02:35So we'll see them in the corner working hard there.
02:51At the bottom of the screen, there's Kim Ord.
02:56She's the spacecraft operations manager.
03:01Yeah, we just received word that they did receive acquisition of signal.
03:04So go IMAP.
03:05That's excellent news.
03:07And that came fast because they had that lock on Hawaii.
03:10They also have two ground stations from the Deep Space Network in California.
03:14So they locked in acquisition of signal.
03:17That tells them that IMAP so far is there right where they expected.
03:22Exactly.
03:23They knew where to look in the sky, and they were primed and ready to actually talk to the spacecraft when it was ready.
03:28So kudos to them.
03:29I love physics.
03:29I love when things work the way they're supposed to work.
03:31It's a great stuff.
03:32And it's a beautiful thing to watch it live as well.
03:34It's a beautiful thing to watch it as well.
03:35Agreed.
03:36Agreed.
03:36So our next major milestone would be the separation of SWIFO L1, which is still on the stack.
03:44That's scheduled for T-plus one hour and 30 minutes.
03:49We did have an on-time liftoff this morning, 7.30 a.m. Eastern Time, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
03:56During that flight, we achieved successful stage separation and re-landing of the first stage booster.
04:01Completed two burns on the second stage to get to this point.
04:05And we've deployed the first of three payloads.
04:09That's IMAP has already been successfully deployed.
04:13SWIFO L1 and Carruthers will follow.
04:15Now, for the Carruthers payload, this is equipped with a geocoronal imager.
04:22And this will be able to detect fundamental characteristics of the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere.
04:28And we're listening in for the deployment of SWIFO L1.
04:41There we go.
04:42SWIFO L1 deploy confirmed.
04:48Beautiful separation and successful deployment of the SWIFO L1 payload.
04:53We're not done yet.
04:57We do have one more payload coming up.
04:59That's NASA's Carruthers Geocorona Observatory.
05:02We already received that acquisition of signal from the IMAP payload.
05:06And SWIFO L1 is significant.
05:08We are at an altitude of roughly 5,000 kilometers.
05:12Correct.
05:13And if you recall, we were looking at the altimeter there on the bottom right screen.
05:17We kind of deploy SWIFO L1 about 3,800 kilometers.
05:20And so as we're on that escape trajectory, as I was mentioning earlier,
05:25we are seeing our altitude steadily increase as we move to the Carruthers spacecraft also being deployed.
05:31Carruthers, separation confirmed.
05:33Awesome.
05:34There we go.
05:35That is cool.
05:37Carruthers separating, beginning its mission to capture the faint ultraviolet glow of Earth's outer atmosphere.
05:45All three released.
05:47Yeah.
05:47Congratulations to all three teams.
05:49And this is a big day for all of them.
05:51And also congrats to the LSP team and the SpaceX teams who worked tirelessly to get these missions off the ground.
05:56So kudos to all of them.
05:58And the team for Carruthers now are going to be very anxious as they look for their acquisition of signal.
06:06Because the spacecraft has to turn on and run a number of items.
06:12A number of items.
06:12But I believe, based on the reaction in the room, they may have gotten it pretty quick.
06:19They may have.
06:19Let's listen and see if we get an update to the NLM, the NASA launch manager.
06:30Unofficially, it looks like they may have got AOS.
06:32But officially, we have not heard it yet on our nets.
06:40So we may have been seeing the reaction for the spacecraft separation and just general excitement about making it to this point, which is a big deal.
06:49It's a very big deal.
06:50Very big deal.
06:52Yeah, this mission was a mission where we had three payloads.
06:56And it almost was trying to be almost like it was three primaries.
07:00So I just want to give, once again, kudos to the team for getting this done.
07:03The team looked over almost 500 different requirement verifications they had to get this mission off.
07:07So just think about that.
07:09500 different requirements you've got to verify.
07:11That's a lot.
07:11So, yeah, big deal.
07:27Yes, with OL-1, have telemetry at the MOC.
07:31Excellent news.
07:32Congratulations.
07:33We just heard confirmation from NASA launch manager Denton Gibson was given confirmation that acquisition of signal has happened for SWIFT.
07:41Yeah, congratulations to SWIFT-OL-1.
07:44Big accomplishment there.
07:46So it looks like everything was put into a good orbit.
07:50A great job by the second stage of the Falcon, Amanda.
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