Jan. 11 (UPI) — SpaceX early Sunday morning launched its first Twilight rideshare flight from California, launching satellites for NASA, an Internet-of-Things services company and an experiment to 3-D print a boom in space.
The company’s first rideshare launch of the year, which also is the start of a new series of dedicated smallsat rideshare missions, launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 5:44 a.m. PST from Space Launch Complex 4E.
SpaceX sent 40 payloads to a dusk-dawn sun-synchronous orbit atop a Falcon 9 first stage booster that previously has launched Sentinel-6B and three Starlink missions. The orbital position is the separating line of night and day on Earth.
After launch, the booster returned to land at Landing Zone 4 at Vandenberg about an hour later as satellite deployment sequences started around the same time, SpaceX said in posts on X and on its website.
The 40 payloads SpaceX carried to space were scheduled to be deployed into orbit over the course of about 90 minutes.
NASA’s Pandora small satellite is planned to study at least 20 exoplanets and the activity of their host stars as it passes over the same spot on Earth each day, where the Sun will be behind it to prevent light from affecting its image and data collection, the agency said.
Although they are not NASA projects, the agency also is involved with two cubesat small satellite missions — the Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat, or SPARCS, for Arizona State University, and the Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope, or BlackCat, which will be operated by researchers at Penn State University.
Dcubed, a company developing deployable space structures and in-space manufacturing systems, sent its ARAQYS-D1 mission, which will 3-D print and manufacture a 60-centimeter ISM boom in free space as a proof of concept.
The 3D-printing mission is one of more than 22 payloads on the SpaceX mission being supported by Exolaunch, which has worked with many space agencies and private companies to send missions into orbit on SpaceX rideshares.
Among the other payloads are satellites to provide Internet of Things connectivity for the Turkish company Plan-S Satellite and Space Technologies and Spire Global’s Hyperspectral Microwave Sounder 16U CubeSat, which will study the Earth’s internal atmosphere, NASA Spacelight reported.
