NASA successfully launched the first of a trio of probe rocket missions to study Alpha Centauri from Australia, first in a historic agency.
The agency’s launch of a Black Brant IX sound rocket on Sunday (June 26) from the Arnhem Space Center in the Northern Territory of Australia is NASA’s first commercial launch outside the United States.
The rocket sent the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s X-ray quantum calorimeter, or XQC, to examine X-rays in the area of ​​gas and dust between stars known as the interstellar medium.
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A Black Brant IX spacecraft was launched from the Arnhem Space Center in Australia on June 26, 2022. On board was an experiment with the X-ray Quantum Calorimeter. (Image credit: NASA)
Although NASA has not yet made public the official launch time, NASA’s Expeditions account posted a video of the explosion (opens in a new tab) at 12:46 pm EDT ( 16:46 GMT or 2:46 am on Monday, June 26 at the launch site.) CNN reported (opens in a new tab) that the launch took place just after midnight, local time, citing Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA), which is the developer, owner and operator of Arnhem.
The three-mission launch campaign required a “major logistics company,” including sending each rocket to the launch site via a barge and transporting more than 70 NASA personnel to the southern hemisphere. , Melissa de Zwart, professor of digital technology, security and governance. at Flinders University in Australia, he wrote in The Conversation.
Take off! 🚀 A Black Brant IX sound rocket launched from @ ela_space’s Arnhem Space Center in the Northern Territory, Australia, carrying the X-ray Quantum Calorimeter experiment. The next launch from Australia is scheduled for July 4. . pic.twitter.com/yEuZx83n7126 June 2022
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The three missions, including Sunday’s launch, “will conduct astrophysics studies that can only be done from the southern hemisphere,” NASA said in the media kit (opens in a new tab) for the missions .
The next two missions will study Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to ours. The next of the trio will fly no earlier than July 4, launching the University of Colorado Boulder suborbital imaging spectrograph for irradiation of the transition region from the host stars of the nearby exoplanet, or SISTINE.
“SISTINE will study how ultraviolet light from stars affects the atmospheres of the planets around them, including gases that are believed to be signs of life,” NASA said in a June 7 statement (opens a new tab) about suborbital launches.
The third mission, scheduled for July 12, is another UC Boulder mission called the Dual Channel Extreme Ultraviolet Continuous Experiment or DEUCE. The mission aims to conduct observations using a range of the spectrum of ultraviolet light that is rarely accessed for astronomy.
“These measurements are needed to model stars similar to and smaller than our sun, as well as to understand their effects on planetary atmospheres,” NASA said.
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