After a one-day delay, a Falcon 9 rocket delivered NASA’s twin spacecraft Wednesday morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, loudly announcing its farewell into clear skies to collect data about a little-known phenomenon between the sun and Earth.
The SpaceX rocket blasted off at 11:13 a.m. from Space Launch Complex-4 on South Base, crackling as it climbed away from the Central Coast.
More than seven minutes later, the rocket’s first-stage booster completed its 16th mission, with popping sonic booms sounding the return to Vandenberg.
The primary cargo aboard the rocket was NASA’s Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, or TRACERS, mission.
The two nearly identical satellites, stacked atop each other for the trip to space, deployed from the rocket more than 90 minutes after liftoff.
Scientists hope the TRACERS twins’ $170-million mission will deliver details about a link between the sun and Earth related to space weather.
“What we will learn from TRACERS is critical for the understanding and eventually the predicting of how energy from our sun impacts the Earth and our space- and ground-based assets whether it be GPS or communication signals, power grids, space assets and our astronauts working up in space,” said Joe Westlake, Heliophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters
“It’s going to help us keep our way of life safe here on Earth and help to continue to enable safe space exploration,” he added.
The twin craft will explore how Earth’s magnetic shield — the magnetosphere — protects the planet from the stream of material, dubbed solar wind, generated by the sun.
“Understanding our sun and the space weather it produces is more important to us here on Earth I think than most realize,” Westlake said.
Sometimes, the solar wind doesn’t affect life on Earth since the magnetosphere fends its off. Other times, the solar wind affects Earth.
That can lead to “beautiful things,” such as Northern Lights, but also interrupts life on Earth.
Space weather’s earthly impacts include a farmer’s a poor signal interfering with precision planting operations or a power grid manager taking steps to avoid a blackout blamed on space weather.
Scientists want to know how the link between solar wind and the magnetic shield change in space and in time.
A long-term challenge has been a lone satellite collecting data from the magnetic region and only returning 90 minutes later, leaving scientists with multiple questions unanswered.
“So we have two spacecraft — this is the novel part of TRACERS — and they’re going to follow each other in a very close separation,” said David Miles, principal investigator for TRACERS and an associate professor at the University of Iowa.
In space, one TRACERS craft will trail the other separated by 10 seconds to 2 minutes, collecting a pair of measurements on the local state of plasma spewed from the sun.
“We have these two well-instrumented spacecraft that make two closely spaced snapshots that will allow us to understand how things change,” Miles added.
The TRACERS mission involves government, academia and aerospace industry firms.
Airspace concerns that affected communications and air traffic control systems in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties forced to the team to scrub Tuesday’s launch attempt and aim for Wednesday.
That was a short wait for the University of Iowa which called the launch “a moment 8 years in the making” and noted the mission’s status as “the largest externally funded research project in the history of the University of Iowa.”
Each craft sports instruments built at the University of Iowa, UCLA and University of California Berkeley along with the Southwest Research Institute. The TRACERS satellites will operate for one year, but officials said the craft could continue working for a longer period. .
TRACERS is the latest heliophysics mission for NASA from Vandenberg, and follows another known as PUNCH, made up of four satellites, earlier this year.
While not a word heard daily, Westlake bragged that the term heliophysics — the scientific study of the sun and its effects on the solar system — recently landed in the Mirriam-Webster dictionary. It’s labeled under as slang and trending.
“The fact that it’s now in the dictionary and it’s now on its way to becoming a full-fledge word is really exciting and a huge step forward for this discipline, for my colleagues and for the study of the sun and its affects on the Earth,” Westlake said.
A number of smaller satellites for research, technology demonstration and other purposes also tagged along for the trek with TRACERS.
They were SEOPS’ Epic Athena, Skykraft’s Skykraft 4, Maverick Space Systems’ REAL, Tyvak’s LIDE, and York Space Systems’ Bard.
The next launch for SpaceX at Vandenberg will involve another Starlink mission expected to occur as soon as Saturday night, according to a notice warning boaters about upcoming missions.