Cygnus NG-10 (CRS-10) - Antares-230 - MARS LP-0A - 17.11.2018 09:01 UTC

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11/17/2018 08:10 Stephen Clark

The countdown is moving into testing of the Antares rocket's beacon and telemetry transmitters. This will be followed by checks of the vehicle's flight termination system.

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https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/11/16/antares-launch-timeline-on-the-ng-10-mission/

Antares launch timeline on the NG-10 mission
November 16, 2018 | Stephen Clark


Credit: Orbital ATK

Northrop Grumman's Antares rocket will deliver a Cygnus supply ship into orbit Saturday to begin a two-day pursuit of the International Space Station.

The rocket's two RD-181 engines will ignite around 3.7 seconds before liftoff from pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, a complex owned by the state of Virginia at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility.

Launch is timed for 4:01 a.m. EST (0901 GMT) Saturday.

The first stage's two RD-181 engines will power up to 864,000 pounds of thrust and burn for 3 minutes, 35 seconds, to accelerate the rocket to more than 8,750 mph (3.9 kilometers per second) and an altitude of around 61 miles (99 kilometers), then separate from the upper stage's Castor 30XL motor about six seconds later.

The launch, known as NG-10 in Northrop Grumman's station resupply manifest, will be the fourth Antares mission using new, more powerful RD-181 engines, which the company ordered from the Russian engine-builder NPO Energomash to replace decades-old Russian-built AJ26 engines blamed for an Antares rocket crash seconds after liftoff in October 2014.

Once the first stage finished its job on the NG-10 launch the Antares rocket's 12.8-foot-diameter (3.9-meter) diameter payload shroud will jettison in two halves at around T+plus 4 minutes, 11 seconds. An interstage adapter that connected the first and second stages will separate at T+plus 4 minutes, 16 seconds.

The launcher's Castor 30XL solid-fueled upper stage will ignite at T+plus 4 minutes, 24 seconds, and generate up to 104,300 pounds of thrust during a burn lasting approximately 2 minutes, 42 seconds. The second stage motor will burn out at approximately T+plus 7 minutes, 6 seconds, then deploy the Cygnus spacecraft at around T+plus 9 minutes, 6 seconds.

The spacecraft's two cymbal-shaped electricity-generating solar arrays will unfurl in a fan-like motion around 90 minutes into the mission, and the ship's thrusters will begin fine-tuning its approach to the space station with a series of course-correction burns, setting up for a laser-guided final approach Monday.

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11/17/2018 08:21 Stephen Clark

The propellant loading sequencer has been initiated, beginning steps to ready the Antares rocket and ground systems for filling of the first stage with liquid propellants later in the countdown.

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11/17/2018 10:01 Stephen Clark

Two hours until launch. An upd ated status on the countdown from Northrop Grumman launch conductor Adam Lewis shows the Antares rocket, the Cygnus spacecraft and the Wallops range are all "green" at this time.

The Cygnus spacecraft set for launch aboard the Antares rocket is named the S.S. John Young in honor of the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle astronaut who died in January

The S.S John Young is packed with 7,215 pounds (3,273 kilograms) of supplies and experiments heading to the International Space Station. Here's a breakdown of the cargo manifest provided by NASA:

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• 2,515.5 pounds (1,141 kilograms) of crew supplies
• 2,301.6 pounds (1,044 kilograms) of science investigations
• 2,076.8 pounds (942 kilograms) of vehicle hardware
• 253.5 pounds (115 kilograms) of computer resources
• 68.3 pounds (31 kilograms) of spacewalk equipment
  

The Cygnus supply ship is expected to remain berthed at the International Space Station's Unity module until mid-February, when it will be released by the station's robotic arm.

The automated cargo carrier, loaded with trash after its departure from the station, will fire its engine to climb into a higher orbit roughly 300 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth to deploy two CubeSats.

One of the nanosatellites is MYSat 1, a 1U CubeSat around the size of a Rubik's cube. Carrying two payloads -- camera and a lithion-ion coil cell battery -- MYSat 1 was built by Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi with the support of Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems and Al Yah Satellite Communications Company in the United Arab Emirates.

The other CubeSat se t for release in the higher orbit is CHEFSat 2 from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

About the size of a shoebox, CHEFSat 2 is a copy of a CubeSat launched on a Cygnus cargo mission to the space station last November. CHEFSat 2 will test commercial off-the-shelf technologies to evaluate their performance in space, focusing on new radio communications capabilities.

Cygnus will lower its orbit below the space station's altitude after releasing MYSat 1 and CHEFSat 2, targeting an altitude of around 200 miles (325 kilometers) for separation of KickSat 2, a NASA-sponsored CubeSat mission led by principal investigator Zac Manchester at Stanford University.

KickSat 2 carries 100 tiny "sprites" -- essentially 1.4-inch (3.5-centimeter) square circuit boards with integrated power, computing, sensing and communication equipment. The mission is a follow-up to the KickSat mission that launched in 2014, but failed to release its sprites in orbit.

The mission will test the limits of satellite miniaturization, a trend toward affordability widely popularized by the CubeSat design over the last two decades. But KickSat's sprites are a tiny fraction of the size of a CubeSat.

KickSat 2 will eject its sprites at a lower altitude to ensure the circuit boards re-enter Earth's atmosphere in a matter of weeks, avoiding the possibility of the sprites, which could be difficult to track with ground-based radars, becoming a long-term space debris threat to other satellites.

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11/17/2018 10:03 Stephen Clark

A report from the Wallops range indicates that toxic and debris constraints are "green."

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11/17/2018 10:06 Stephen Clark

An updated weather report shows no concerns, and the launch weather officer has upped his probability of acceptable conditions at launch time to 100 percent.

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11/17/2018 10:19 Stephen Clark

Northrop Grumman launch conductor Adam Lewis has polled the Antares launch team, and all stations reported they are "go" to begin fueling the liquid-fueled first stage with RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen.

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11/17/2018 10:21 Stephen Clark

The countdown has resumed after a 20-minute built-in hold.

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Northrop Grumman‏Подлинная учетная запись @northropgrumman 23:23 - 16 нояб. 2018 г.

L-01:38 - #Antares, #Cygnus, weather and range are all green and we are GO to begin fueling.

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11/17/2018 10:31 Stephen Clark

Propellant has started pumping into the Antares rocket's first stage. About 21,000 gallons of RP-1, a high-refined rocket-grade kerosene, and about 41,000 gallons of liquid oxygen will be loaded into the first stage over the next half-hour.

The kerosene is stored at roughly room temperature and the liquid oxygen is chilled to around minus 298 degrees Fahrenheit. The oxygen will slowly boil off during the countdown, and liquid oxygen will continue flowing into the rocket until shortly before liftoff.

One change introduced by the Antares 230 rocket, which made its maiden flight in 2016, is the elimination of "sub-cooled" liquid oxygen chilled and densified at minus 383 degrees Fahrenheit for the Antares rocket's old AJ26 engines. The RD-181s consume the oxidizer at its boiling point.

The first stage tanks are designed by Yuzhnoye and built by Yuzhmash in Ukraine based on heritage from the Zenit rocket. The liquid oxygen tank is positioned in the upper part of the 12.8-foot-diameter stage and the RP-1 tank is in the lower part of the stage.

The first stage's two RD-181 engines will consume the liquid propellant during a 3-minute, 35-second burn.

The Antares second stage, a Castor 30XL motor built by Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, is propelled by solid fuel already loaded into the rocket.

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11/17/2018 10:54 Stephen Clark

A few minutes ago, gripper arms on the transporter-erector-launcher opened, and the structure moved to the so-called "pre-pullback" position.

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William Harwood‏ @cbs_spacenews 4 мин. назад

Antares/NG10: Liftoff from pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport/Wallops Island, VA, is targeted for 4:01:23am EST; clear skies are expected

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11/17/2018 11:09 Stephen Clark

Engineers are selecting and loading the preferred trajectory file into the Antares flight computer at this time.

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11/17/2018 11:11 Stephen Clark

Fifty minutes until launch. Fueling operations continue for today's liftoff at 4:01:23 a.m. EST (0901:23 GMT). The launch window extends for five minutes.

Wallops regularly launches suborbital sounding rockets for scientific and engineering research purposes, and the facility has occasionally launched small satellites with Northrop Grumman's Minotaur rockets.

The Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority owns the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, which oversaw development of the launch pad used by Antares. The Commonwealth of Virginia paid for about $80 million of the $120 million cost of the launch pad, with most of the rest of the funding coming from the federal government.

Combined with the cost of the Antares hangar and a Minotaur rocket launch pad just south of the Antares facility, the MARS complex cost about $150 million.

After the Antares launch failure in October 2014, NASA, Orbital ATK and MARS each contributed $5 million to repair the launch pad.

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11/17/2018 11:11 Stephen Clark

The Antares' SIGI guidance computer is being aligned and configured for today's launch.

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Идёт заправка...

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11/17/2018 11:21 Stephen Clark

40 minutes until liftoff. The Cygnus spacecraft on this flight is carrying 3,273 kilograms, or 7,215 pounds, of supplies to the International Space Station. This is the seventh flight of the enlarged Cygnus pressurized cargo module from Thales Alenia Space, providing 25 percent more interior volume for supplies. The spacecraft measures about 20 feet tall, and the pressurized cargo module has a volume of about 27 cubic meters, or 950 cubic feet.

Here are some statistics on today's launch:

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• 9th Antares rocket launch
• 4th launch of the Antares 230 configuration
• 15th orbital launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport
• 11th launch of a Cygnus spacecraft
• 2nd orbital launch from Wallops in 2018
• 28th U.S. orbital launch in 2018
• 93rd global orbital launch attempt in 2018
  

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