SpaceX Falcon 9 V1.1 - DSCOVR - Launching February 11, 2015
Screenshot from SpaceX Webcast of the launch of DSCOVR just before sunset
Mission Rundown: SpaceX Falcon 9 V1.1 - DSCOVR
Written: February 3, 2015
What. Land in 7 meters high waves?
SpaceX’s customer for the DSCOVR mission is the United States Air Force and with NOAA and NASA. In this flight, the Falcon 9 rocket will deliver the DSCOVR satellite to a 187 x 1,241,000 km orbit at 37 degrees. The DSCOVR launch window is instantly and will open at approximately 6:03:32pm EST on Monday, February 11, 2015, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. If all goes as planned, the DSCOVR satellite will be deployed approximately 35 minutes after liftoff.
The Science Payload
Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR; formerly known as Triana, unofficially known as GoreSat) is a NOAA space weather, space climate, and Earth observation satellite. It was launched by SpaceX on a Falcon 9 launch vehicle on February 11, 2015, from Cape Canaveral This is NOAA's first operational deep space satellite and became its primary system of warning Earth in the event of solar magnetic storms.
DSCOVR was originally proposed as an Earth observation spacecraft positioned at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrangian point, providing live video of the sunlit side of the planet through the Internet as well as scientific instruments to study climate change. Political changes in the United States resulted in the mission's cancellation, and in 2001 the spacecraft was placed into storage.
We ain’t paying for that thing. U.S. Congress.
Proponents of the mission continued to push for its reinstatement, and a change in presidential administration in 2009 resulted in DSCOVR being taken out of storage and refurbished, and its mission was refocused to solar observation and early warning of coronal mass ejections while still providing Earth observation and climate monitoring.
It finally launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 11, 2015, and after some fancy orbit changes reached L1 on June 8, 2015.
NOAA operates DSCOVR from its Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland, Maryland. The acquired space data that allows for accurate weather forecasts are carried out in the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. Archival records are held by the National Centers for Environmental Information, and processing of Earth sensor data is carried out by NASA.
DSCOVR is built on the SMEX-Lite spacecraft bus and has a launch mass of approximately 570 kg (1,257 lb). The main science instrument sets are the Sun-observing Plasma Magnetometer (PlasMag) and the Earth-observing NIST Advanced Radiometer (NISTAR) and Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC). DSCOVR has two deployable solar arrays, a propulsion module, boom, and antenna.
From its vantage point, DSCOVR monitors variable solar wind conditions, provides early warning of approaching coronal mass ejections and observes phenomena on Earth, including changes in ozone, aerosols, dust and volcanic ash, cloud height, vegetation cover and climate.
At its Sun-Earth L1 location it has a continuous view of the Sun and of the sunlit side of the Earth. After the spacecraft arrived on-site and entered its operational phase, NASA began releasing near-real-time images of Earth through the EPIC instrument's website. DSCOVR takes full-Earth pictures about every two hours and is able to process them faster than other Earth observation satellites.
The spacecraft orbits the L1 point in a six-month period, with a spacecraft Earth–Sun angle varying from 4° to 15°. In real life DSCOVR spirals around the Sun equally pulled by both the Earth’s and the Sun's gravity, so it doesn't waste energy maintaining its apparent position relative to both celestial bodies.
Landing Test Results
SpaceX planned to conduct a test flight where they would attempt to bring the first stage back through the atmosphere and land the expended first stage on a 90-by-50-meter (300 ft × 160 ft) floating landing platform.
Relative to earlier tests, the first-stage return on DSCOVR was much more challenging, especially in atmospheric reentry due to the deep-space nature of the Earth–Sun L1 launch trajectory for DSCOVR.
This would only be the second time that SpaceX ever tried to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle. SpaceX expected deceleration-force loads to be twice as high and rocket heating to quadruple over the reentry conditions on Falcon 9 Flight 14 CRS-5.
Before the launch, the drone ship was in ocean surface conditions that made the barge landing infeasible. Therefore, the landing platform attempt was called off, and the first stage made an over-water soft landing test instead. This continued the collection of returnable first-stage test data on all the earlier phases of the flight test and added data on stage survival following a high-speed, high-load atmospheric entry.
With calm waters the first stage booster could have made a historic first landing.
