![]() “It’s a very large payload with lots of connectivity and spot teams,” Froeliger told Spaceflight Now in a pre-launch interview. The orbit-raising will take about three weeks, followed by three weeks of testing to make sure Intelsat 40e’s Ku-band and Ka-band communications payload is ready for operations, according to Froeliger. The satellite will use its own propulsion system to climb into a circular geostationary orbit. Maxar confirmed the spacecraft deployed solar panels and began transmitting telemetry to ground controllers soon after separation from the Falcon 9. Intelsat 40e separated from the Falcon 9 rocket about 32 minutes into the mission. ![]() The upper stage lit its engine for two burns to place the 13,582-pound (6,161-kilogram) Intelsat 40e spacecraft into a so-called sub-synchronous transfer orbit, an elliptical loop that ranges between a few hundred miles above Earth to a peak altitude just shy of geostationary altitude. The Falcon 9 headed east from Cape Canaveral, with nine kerosene-fueled Merlin 1D engines pushing the launcher through the atmosphere before the booster stage shut down, separated from the rocket’s upper stage, then began a controlled descent back to a SpaceX recovery vessel more than 400 miles (670 kilometers) downrange from the launch site. There are similar instruments monitoring air pollution from satellites in low Earth orbit, but those missions provide just a single observation each day. “TEMPO will be measuring pollution and air quality across greater North America on an hourly basis during the daytime, all the way from Puerto Rico up to the tar sands of Canada,” said Kevin Daugherty, TEMPO’s project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center.įor the first time, scientists will receive air quality measurements multiple times per day once TEMPO begins observations after this year. Forecasters will also use the measurements to predict air quality in cities, which can have significant impacts on human health. The TEMPO instrument, about the size of a washing machine, will scan North America to measure pollutants in the atmosphere, collecting data for scientists to study how concentrations of chemicals produced from human activity and natural processes change throughout the day. NASA’s Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, or TEMPO, instrument is attached to the Intelsat 40e communications satellite. Mobility services means mainly in-flight connectivity for commercial airlines, but it also means inflight connectivity for regional business jets, as well as mobility for government customers and maritime customers on cruises, for example.” ![]() “Its primary mission is for mobility services. “Intelsat 40e is a high throughput satellite, so it brings a lot of capacity over North America,” said Jean-Luc Froeliger, Intelsat’s senior vice president of space systems. The spacecraft, built by Maxar, will orbit in lock-step with Earth’s rotation over the equator at 91 degrees west longitude, giving it a view of North America 24 hours per day. The Intelsat 40e satellite will be positioned in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) above Earth to begin a 15-year mission providing Ku-band and Ka-band communications services. The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket fired away from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 12:30 a.m. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral shortly after midnight Friday with Intelsat 40e, a communications satellite destined to beam broadband internet signals to airplane and cruise ship passengers across North America while hosting a NASA instrument package to monitor air pollution.
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