Thursday, December 09, 2010

SpaceX rocks and 1 sat

SpaceX

Well, the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon capsule attached went of nearly without a hitch on Wednesday. They had to stop the countdown on the first attempt, but the second countdown went off without a hitch. Both stages of the rocket performed nominally (i.e. within parameters), the Dragon capsule detacted successfully and then the Dragon capsule performed 2 orbits 180 miles above the earth, re-entered the atmosphere, deployed the 3 main chutes and splashed down in the Pacific ocean 500 miles off of Southern California. Only 6 countries have ever sent up an object and successfully returned it to earth. This marks the first time that a non-country organization has done this. Awesome.

It was also determined that the Dragon carried two payloads. One was a military nanosatellite for the Army. The other what a big wheel of cheese as an homage to a Monty Python skit.

Despite the Monty Python reference :P, it could be that the next stop for the next SpaceX launch could be the International Space Station. That would be HUGE!

=-=-=-=
Sat

Went out to go to work this morning and it was crystal clear, unlike the non-stop cloudy skies we've had for the past week. So I stared at the sky for a few minutes and managed to catch one going from N to S through the W. I also went out this evening around 7"15pm as there were at least some breaks in the clouds, but it was just too late and there were still quite a few clouds. The moon and mostly clouds were in the W and that's where the satellites are likely to be that late in the evening. Didn't see anything in the E. And since I was constantly facing one direction, it started to get cold... though I truly believed it was going to be much colder than it actually was.


Here's the time-line for morning of:
Date: 09-Dec-2010 Thursday


6:20 AM - Cosmos 2428 Rocket - 2.7 Magnitude
Int'l Designator: 2007-029-B

This is my second sighting of this Zenit-2M rocket body. This is a slightly different rocket than the Zenit-2, though I honestly can't tell you what the difference is. Wikipedia says that there are some modification and upgrades. As far as I can tell from both Wikipedia and Gunter's Space Page, there has only been one launch of a Zenit-2M, though it's odd that they show two separate pictures of the rocket and note that two different companies can launch the Zenit-2M. It looks like maybe they've never launched a true Zenit-2SLB and went straight to the Zenit-3SLB. *shrug* I dunno.

Anyways, this rocket launched Cosmos 2428, a Tselina-2 Russian ELINT satellite.

No comments: