SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 - Iridium-8 Next - Launching January 11, 2019
Screenshot of Iridium 8 with Everyday Astronaut Tim Dodd as host
Mission Rundown: SpaceX Falcon 9 - Iridium-8 NEXT
Written: January 10, 2021
Matt Desch countdown 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
SpaceX will be launching the 8th and final mission for Iridium. This launch will place the final 10 Iridium Next satellites in low Earth polar orbit completing the 75 satellite strong constellation. The previous seven missions, beginning with Iridium 1 on January 14, 2017, have already delivered 65 Iridium Next satellites to orbit.
The constellation consists of 66 active satellites in orbit, required for global coverage, and additional 9 spare satellites to serve in case of failure. Satellites are in low Earth orbit at a height of approximately 781 kilometers (485 mi) and inclination of 86.4°. Source: Wikipedia.
B1049 first flew with the Telstar 18V/Apstar-5C satellite on September 10, 2018. So it's been on a long journey to get to the 4 East launchpad on Vandenberg Air Force Base just so the booster’s designation can be changed to B1049-2.
Screenshot of the Iridium 8 mission view: Geoff Barrett
Iridium-8 NEXT - The final piece
Since January 14, 2017 SpaceX have now delivered 75 Iridium communication satellites into 6 different orbit planes placed ~30° apart in low earth polar orbits. 66 of them are in an operational orbit in rows of 11 satellites, and the last 9 are placed as spares in the same orbits awaiting for their activation as operational satellites.
On this eighth launch, six of these satellites will go into operation in Plane 3, while three others will remain as orbital spares. One satellite will be drifted into an adjacent plane. It is unclear which of the old Iridium satellites will be replaced by this eighth batch of Iridium NEXT satellites, but at least 7 old Iridium satellites will be deorbited, when the old guard is exchanged by the new Garde.
Six Iridium NEXT haven’t been launched, they are spare satellites, which will be launched if a satellite is destroyed by collision or accident and no existing spare can be shifted far enough over to replace it. Another reason to launch a spare could be a major malfunction.
All of the satellites will carry ADS-B aviation tracking hosted payloads for Aireon, and 60 of the satellites will carry AIS maritime tracking hosted payloads for exactEarth. In addition of ground to earth transmission antennas and four satellite to satellite connection beams the Iridium satellites share the two other systems in order to provide worldwide data coverage to its global customers, and deliver instant data on its position and condition.
This butterfly patch logo symbolizes the transformation of the Iridium company from caterpillars delivered by Falcon 9’s to become Butterflies in orbit beginning their tasks with providing service to businesses, organizations and government agencies world wide. Ships, Planes, Trucks, Rescue services, people far away from civilization and government leaders can call each other on a Iridium Satellite Phone.
On the Iridium NEXT future network there will be room for the Iridium Certus broadband service, a technology platform that was developed into Iridium NEXT. It’s a computer platform that scales all the way from low-speed IoT (Internet of Things) all the way up into higher speed broadband capabilities such as a firmware upgrade to about 350 kb/s up and about 700 kb/s down on a L-band data capability.
Every time a Iridium NEXT satellite passes over a ground station, it relays data from all sorts of trackers, remote phone calls from anywhere and now internet data streams to anyone with a receiver through the Iridium NEXT satellite network.
By February 1, 2019 this tweet from Matt Desch read: Last Monday, we activated SV 167 & SV 171, bringing operational NEXT satellites to 62 of 66. 2 more (SV 172 & SV 173) are on track to activate tomorrow. All satellites are working great! Only a few old generation Block 1 satellites remain, and on December 28, 2019 a press release notified, that the last old spare satellite SV 97 was deorbited over Russia.
Iridium NEXT are now the new Iridium Constellation ready to serve for 15-20 years.
The eight Iridium NEXT missions launched into following planes 1-6 on these dates and some of them either stay fixed in orbit or move to other neighboring orbit planes. These 6 plane orbits precede westward and pass over VAFB about 330 seconds earlier every day. With the Earth daily moving eastward it intercepts the orbit plane before a full 24 hours are gone by, so the orbit plane seems to move backwards.
Already from the third launch Plane 4 was complete except for the spare satellite, and every subsequent launch after that completed an orbit plane.
The table lists launch dates, launch times, number of satellite vehicles staying in this orbit and number of satellite vehicles moving to an neighboring orbit plane or acting as future spare satellite vehicles.
