Astra Rocket Launch Fails Taking 2 NASA Satellites With It
An Astra rocket carrying two NASA storm-tracking satellites suffered a major malfunction shortly after liftoff on Sunday afternoon.
Astra Rocket 3 took off at 1:43 p.m. ET from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station launch pad in Florida. About 10 minutes into its flight, though, the vehicle experienced a second-stage failure.
"After a nominal first stage flight, the upper stage of the rocket shut down early and failed to deliver the TROPICS CubeSats to orbit," NASA explained(Opens in a new window).
The space agency doesn't seem too torn up over the loss of its shoebox-sized satellites: "Small satellites and Class D payloads tolerate relatively high risk and serve as an ideal platform for technical and architecture innovation, contributing to NASA's science research and technology development," it said in a statement.
This was the first of three planned launches for NASA's Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS(Opens in a new window)) mission.
The goal is to place six identical satellites in three slightly different orbital planes to study the formation and development of tropical cyclones, making observations more often than is possible with current weather satellites. Astra views TROPICS as a breakthrough in storm observation(Opens in a new window).
The CubeSats will capture key measurements such as moisture, temperature, and precipitation to predict the direction and intensity of storms, and will join NASA's TROPICS Pathfinder probe already in orbit. Since its launch in June 2021, the pathfinder has captured images of several tropical cyclones, including Hurricane Ida in the US, Cyclone Batsirai over Madagascar, and eastern Japan's Super
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