Iridium Next Flight 6 (x5), GRACE-FO 1, GRACE-FO 2 - Falcon 9 (B1043) - Vandenberg SLC-4E - 22.05.18

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Iridium Corporate‏Подлинная учетная запись @IridiumComm 2 мин. назад

Launch Update: We've been informed that a couple more days of prep is needed for the #Iridium6/#GRACEFO rideshare launch, which is now targeting NET Monday, 5/21. Instantaneous launch window = 12:53:33 PM PDT (19:53:33 UTC).

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NASA‏Подлинная учетная запись @NASA 1 ч. назад

GRACE-FO, a mission that will track the movement of water on Earth, is launching along with Iridium. Iridium's launch team is now targeting liftoff for no earlier than Monday, May 21 at 3:53 pm ET/12:53pm PT

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NOTMAR

NAVAREA XII 213/2018 (18,21)

EASTERN NORTH PACIFIC.
CALIFORNIA.
1. HAZARDOUS OPERATIONS, ROCKET LAUNCHING
   191911Z TO 192050Z MAY, ALTERNATES
   201911Z TO 202050Z, 211911Z TO 212050Z,
   221911Z TO 222050Z, 231911Z TO 232050Z MAY
   IN AREA BOUND BY
   26-14N 120-00W, 26-15N 121-19W,
   29-00N 121-18W, 29-00N 120-00W.
2. CANCEL THIS MSG 232150Z MAY 18.

( 140300Z MAY 2018 )

Пусковой период: с 19 по 23 мая с.г.
Пусковое окно: с 19:11 до 20:50 UTC

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Возможно, тоже наш клиент

NOTMAR

HYDROPAC 1832/2018 (GEN)

SOUTH PACIFIC.
SOUTHWESTERN INDIAN OCEAN.
1. HAZARDOUS OPERATIONS, SATELLITE RE-ENTRY:
   A. 192144Z TO 192228Z MAY, ALTERNATES
   202144Z TO 202228Z, 212144Z TO 212228Z,
   222144Z TO 222228Z, 232144Z TO 232228Z MAY
   IN AREA BOUND BY
   50-54S 149-42W, 49-06S 140-48W,
   71-48S 130-00W, 72-48S 149-42W.
   B. 192155Z TO 192239Z MAY, ALTERNATES
   202155Z TO 202239Z, 212155Z TO 212239Z,
   222155Z TO 222239Z, 232155Z TO 232239Z MAY
   IN AREA BOUND BY
   67-04S 019-28E, 65-39S 010-16E,
   60-24S 012-33E, 52-30S 016-09E,
   46-44S 018-47E, 45-00S 022-31E,
   47-23S 027-58E, 53-19S 029-29E,
   61-20S 030-56E, 65-34S 031-34E.
2. CANCEL THIS MSG 232339Z MAY 18.

( 140323Z MAY 2018 )

Предположительно, зона A - зона затопления 2-й ст РН

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https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/grace-fo-will-help-monitor-droughts

May 14, 2018

GRACE-FO Will Help Monitor Droughts


GRACE Follow-On's measurements of changes in water stored underground will be used in producing U.S. Drought Monitor maps, which track drought nationwide.
Credits: USDA

You may not notice water in the ground under your feet, but it plays an important role in keeping you alive. Plants draw water fr om soil into their roots and use it to grow. If there's not enough, the resulting drought may have impacts that spread across local water supplies, regional agriculture and even international food prices. NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission was the first satellite system to directly measure global changes in the water stored underground in the world's largest aquifers. GRACE Follow-On, scheduled to launch this month, will continue this important task.

Спойлер

"There really are no remote sensing products that are equivalent to GRACE data in giving a snapshot of conditions in deep aquifers," said Brian Wardlow, director of the Center for Advanced Land Management Information Technologies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Wardlow is familiar with the value of this information in understanding drought. He worked at the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) in Lincoln when the original GRACE data were first incorporated into experimental products of the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor maps. The maps show soil moisture at three underground levels: the top few inches of soil, the top few feet/one meter of soil (the root zone), and aquifers.

The U.S. Drought Monitor maps are one of the nation's most important tools for tracking drought across the United States. They are widely used by decision makers at federal and state levels. For example, the current U.S. Farm Bill designates the Drought Monitor's county-by-county drought rankings as the standard for judging eligibility for some federal disaster assistance programs.

Climatologist Brian Fuchs of NDMC, one of the team of scientists who author the drought maps, explained that soil moisture is sparsely measured on the ground. "Some states have their own [ground] networks, but the data is spotty, and that makes it very difficult to use the products in a national assessment," he said. "GRACE covers the entire country, and it helps us to get an idea of where areas of wetness and dryness are."

The NDMC also considered GRACE data in producing other NDMC resources such as the Quick Drought Response Index (QuickDRI), a NASA-supported project with multiple institutional partners. QuickDRI is an early warning system for flash droughts -- rapidly developing losses of soil moisture due to heat waves and lack of rain. The onset of a flash drought is hard to detect at ground level, but its impacts on agriculture may be as harsh as those of a seasonal drought.

Getting the Data into the Maps

When GRACE launched in 2002, the science team knew the data would be useful for measuring the depletion of large aquifers. However, most hydrologists were unfamiliar with the measurement. One of the few exceptions was Matt Rodell, now chief of the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Rodell had recently done his doctoral research on how the new GRACE data could be used for monitoring underground water.


A U.S. Drought Monitor map fr om September 2015, while the GRACE mission was active, showing severe drought in California, Nevada and New Mexico. GRACE-FO data will be used in similar products.
Credits: NDMC

Since the techniques used by GRACE record the total change in mass from month to month, not whether that change occurred above ground, near the surface in the soil, or well below ground, Rodell and Jay Famiglietti, now at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, needed to combine the GRACE data with meteorological and other data to separate the underground water changes from above-ground and near-surface changes. After several experiments with the combined observations, Rodell and Famiglietti were able to isolate the signal of changing water in aquifers for the first time ever using remote sensing data.

Another obstacle between GRACE and operational drought monitoring was a mismatch in time and spatial scales. GRACE data products were produced once a month with a resolution of about 115 square miles (300 square kilometers). Water managers need new data every few days to keep up with changing soil moisture, and they would prefer to have it on the scale of their county, district or similar smaller area. Rodell and his team at Goddard assimilated the GRACE data and a long-term record of weather observations such as precipitation, temperature and solar radiation into a NASA hydrology model, called the Catchment Land Surface Model. It is a numerical model of water and energy processes on land, developed for research on the global water cycle. With sophisticated numerical modeling techniques and data analysis, the Goddard team was able to downscale the GRACE data, that is, to adapt its larger time and space scales to "fit" the model's finer scales.

The team generated experimental drought indicators from downscaled data each week from 2011 until the GRACE mission ended in October 2017.

Looking Ahead

Because the original GRACE mission ended after the end of the growing season last fall, NDMC's Fuchs said that its loss has not yet been strongly felt by the Drought Monitor mappers. "We would be looking for GRACE in the growing season, wh ere soil moisture is pertinent to determining crops and vegetation," he said. "In a couple more months, people will be asking, 'Wh ere are these data?'"

Those people will most likely have their answer before the 2019 growing season, as GRACE Follow-On begins delivering monthly maps. Fuchs said, "If it's going to behave as GRACE did in the past, it will be a valuable asset."

GRACE-FO, like GRACE, is designed to measure changes in gravitational pull that result from changes in mass on Earth. More than 99 percent of Earth's mean gravitational pull does not change from one month to the next. That's because it comes from the mass of the solid Earth itself -- its surface and interior -- and that rarely moves, or moves very slowly. Water, on the other hand, moves continually nearly everywhere: Snow falls, ocean currents flow, ice melts and so on. As the twin GRACE-FO satellites orbit Earth, one closely following the other, the changes in mass below change the distance between the two satellites very slightly. The record of these changes is analyzed to create monthly global maps of changes and redistribution of Earth's mass near the surface.

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Last Updated: May 14, 2018
Editor: Tony Greicius

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Iridium Corporate‏Подлинная учетная запись @IridiumComm 28 мин. назад

Update to the Launch Update: Due to range availability at VAFB, #Iridium6/#GRACEFO is now targeting 1 day later; NET 5/22 with backup of 5/23. Instantaneous launch on 5/22 = 12:47:58 pm PDT (19:47:58 UTC) #IridiumNEXT #HereWeGo

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Chris B - NSF‏ @NASASpaceflight 6 мин. назад

And there it is finding the Range (moved to the 22nd required 'Range Request' to 'Range Approved'. Static Fire test likely to be looking at Friday now.

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Matt Desch‏ @IridiumBoss 12 ч. назад

We were ready for 5/21, but the base isn't. Let's hope for good weather and a great launch on 5/22 instead.

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https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/05/16/new-target-dates-set-for-next-two-falcon-9-launches/

New target dates set for next two Falcon 9 launches
May 16, 2018 | Stephen Clark


The two GRACE-Follow On Earth science satellites are mounted atop five Iridium Next satellites in preparation for liftoff May 22 from California. Credit: Iridium

The launch of five commercial Iridium message relay satellites and a pair of U.S.-German orbiting geophysics probes on a Falcon 9 rocket from California has been delayed three days to May 22, ...

The delay for the Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, allows time for SpaceX to resolve an issue preparing the mission's Falcon 9 rocket, Iridium chief executive Matt Desch said Monday.

Спойлер

Speaking to reporters in a conference call, Desch said SpaceX encountered a "minor processing issue" preparing a component of the Falcon 9 rocket. He did not provide further details on the nature of the problem, but said it was "not a big deal."

Desch said Monday that the launch would likely be pushed back two days by the rocket processing issue, but Iridium announced Tuesday the mission would be delayed an extra day "due to range availability" at Vandenberg.

The launch from California had been scheduled for Saturday, May 19. Liftoff is now targeted for Tuesday, May 22, at 12:47:58 p.m. PDT (3:47:58 p.m. EDT; 1947:58 GMT) from Space Launch Complex 4-West at the military base on the Pacific coast northwest of Los Angeles.

The mission will be the sixth Falcon 9 launch for Iridium. Unlike the previous five SpaceX missions that deployed Iridium payloads, which each carried 10 of the company's new-generation Iridium Next satellites, the next launch will loft five Iridium spacecraft in a rideshare arrangement with two Earth science satellites developed by NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences.

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On satellites will extend measurements of Earth's gravity field collected by the twin GRACE satellites from 2002 through 2017.

The gravity measurements, calculated by continuously tracking the exact distance between the two formation-flying spacecraft in orbit, will tell scientists about movements in Earth's oceans, underground aquifers, ice sheets and land masses.

The GRACE-FO satellites, built in Europe by Airbus Defense and Space, were originally booked to launch on a Russian-Ukrainian Dnepr rocket derived from a Soviet-era ballistic missile. But Russia discontinued Dnepr launches as relations with Ukraine deteriorated in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea.

That left the GRACE-FO satellites without a ride to space until German officials, which are responsible for securing launch services, negotiated a rideshare launch with Iridium and SpaceX.

Two of Iridium's upgraded, new-generation satellites were also left on the ground after the Dnepr rocket program was halted.

With next week's launch, Iridium will have 55 of its new satellites in orbit. They replace Iridium's aging voice and data relay satellites launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s, providing satellite phone, messaging, and ship and aircraft tracking services worldwide.

The Falcon 9's upper stage will deploy the two GRACE-FO satellites in orbit around 300 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth, then reignite to climb into a slightly higher orbit for release of the five Iridium payloads.

The May 22 launch will employ a previously-flown Falcon 9 first stage booster first used on the Jan. 7 flight of the U.S. government's top secret Zuma payload from Cape Canaveral. No recovery of the first stage is expected next week — the booster is from an earlier model of the Falcon 9 rocket now out of production — but SpaceX could attempt a retrieval of the Falcon 9's payload shroud using a fast-moving ship dispatched from the Port of Los Angeles.

The nose fairing, which protects satellites during the initial minutes of a launch, is the next piece of the Falcon 9 rocket SpaceX intends to recover and reuse. A vessel named Mr. Steven has been outfitted with a large net, or "catcher's mitt," to try to capture halves of the two-piece fairing as they descend under steerable parafoils.

Iridium has two more missions reserved with SpaceX, each set to add 10 more Iridium Next satellites to the communications network. One of the missions is scheduled for July, with another expected by the end of the summer, and Desch said both will fly on the upgraded "Block 5" version of the Falcon 9 rocket, which debuted Friday with a successful commercial launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
...
SpaceX has two missions planned for June, both from Florida, with the Telstar 19 Vantage communications satellite and the company's next Dragon resupply flight to the International Space Station.

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https://blogs.nasa.gov/gracefo/2018/05/17/prelaunch-briefings-set-for-nasas-grace-fo-mission/

Prelaunch Briefings Set for NASA's GRACE-FO Mission

Sarah Loff
Posted May 17, 2018 at 11:08 am



NASA's latest Earth-observing satellite mission, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) is now scheduled to launch no earlier than Tuesday, May 22 at at 3:47 p.m. EDT.

The GRACE-FO prelaunch briefing will be held on Monday, May 21 at 1:30 p.m. EDT (10:30 a.m. PDT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The briefing will air on NASA Television and the agency's website.

Спойлер

A joint mission with the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), GRACE-FO will provide critical measurements that will be used together with other data to monitor the movement of water masses across the planet and mass changes within Earth itself. Monitoring changes in ice sheets and glaciers, underground water storage, and sea level provides a unique view of Earth's climate and has far-reaching benefits. The mission is planned to fly at least five years.

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https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7128

MAY 16, 2018

Update: Launch Coverage of Earth-Observing Satellites

Revised dates have been set for the prelaunch briefing and launch of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO), NASA's latest Earth-observing satellite mission. The briefing, now scheduled for Monday, May 21, and launch no earlier than Tuesday, May 22, will air on NASA Television and the agency's website, and will be streamed live and archived on https://youtube.com/nasajpl/live.

Спойлер

A joint mission with the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), GRACE-FO will provide critical measurements that will be used together with other data to monitor the movement of water masses across the planet and mass changes within Earth itself. Monitoring changes in ice sheets and glaciers, underground water storage, and sea level provides a unique view of Earth's climate and has far-reaching benefits. The mission is planned to fly at least five years.

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The prelaunch news briefing will be held at 10:30 a.m. PDT (1:30 p.m. EDT) May 21 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

...

Briefing participants will be:

[/li]
• David Jarrett, GRACE-FO program executive in the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters
• Frank Webb, GRACE-FO project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Frank Flechtner, GRACE-FO project manager at GFZ
• Phil Morton, NASA GRACE-FO project manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Capt. Jennifer Haden, weather officer for the 30th Space Wing at Vandenberg
  

The satellites will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than 12:47 p.m. PDT (3:47 p.m. EDT) May 22 from Space Launch Complex-4E at Vandenberg. GRACE-FO will share its ride to orbit with five Iridium NEXT communications satellites as part of a commercial rideshare agreement.

Launch coverage begins at 12:15 p.m. PDT (3:15 p.m. EDT) on NASA Television and the agency's website.

Спойлер

JPL manages the GRACE-FO mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. GFZ contracted GRACE-FO launch services from Iridium, and SpaceX is providing the Falcon 9 launch service.

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2018-101b

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Chris B - NSF‏ @NASASpaceflight 14 мин. назад

... we're waiting for someone to spot a Falcon 9 booster on the Vandy pad for the Static Fire test ahead of Iridium-6/GRACE-FO. #ProbablyFoggy

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Chris B - NSF‏ @NASASpaceflight 2 мин. назад

Confirmed visual of Falcon 9 sat on SLC-4E ahead of her Static Fire test.

ARTICLE: SpaceX Falcon 9 preparing for static fire ahead of Iridium NEXT-6/GRACE-FO mission -

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/05/spacex-falcon-9-static-fire-iridium-next-6-grace-fo/ ...

- By Ian Atkinson (@IanPineapple)

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SpaceX‏Подлинная учетная запись @SpaceX 7 мин. назад

Static fire test of Falcon 9 complete—targeting May 22 launch of Iridium-6/GRACE-FO from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

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https://blogs.nasa.gov/gracefo/2018/05/20/grace-fo-mission-is-ready-for-space/

GRACE-FO Mission Is Ready for Space

Tony Greicius
Posted May 20, 2018 at 4:59 pm

The photo shows the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) being stacked for its rideshare to space with Iridium Communications satellites in a SpaceX processing facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Launch is scheduled for Tuesday, May 22, at 12:47 p.m. PDT.



As of Saturday, meteorologists with the U.S. Air Force's 30th Space Wing were predicting a greater than 90 percent chance of favorable weather for liftoff on Tuesday.

GRACE-FO's five-year mission will monitor the continuous movement of water masses across the planet and mass changes within Earth itself. The mission's measurements of changes in ice sheets and glaciers, underground water storage, deep ocean currents, and other parts of Earth's water cycle give a unique view of our climate and offer far-reaching benefits. The mission is a collaboration between NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences.

There will be a prelaunch briefing tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. PDT/1:30 p.m. EDT. You can watch live coverage of the briefing at http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv or https://youtube.com/nasajpl/live and ask questions via NASA social media, using the hashtag #askNASA.

Credit: Iridium Communications Inc.

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Michael Baylor‏ @nextspaceflight 42 мин. назад

#SpaceX recovery vessel Mr. Steven has left the Port of LA and is heading down range to support a fairing recovery attempt during the Falcon 9 Iridium-6/GRACE-FO mission.

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NASA (JPL) опубликовала брошюру миссии GRACE-FO

grace-fo_launch_press_kit.pdf - 7.0 MB, 38 стр, 2018-05-08 15:53:19 UTC

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