New Delhi:

At the stroke of midnight on Tuesday, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)’s most sophisticated communications satellite, which will provide broadband services in remote areas and in-flight Internet in passenger aircraft, will set off for its 34-minute journey into outer space onboard Elon Musk-owned SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

Named GSAT N-2 or GSAT 20, the 4,700 kg fully commercial satellite will be launched from Space Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral in Florida. The launch pad has been hired by SpaceX from the US’ Space Force, a special branch of the country’s armed forces that was created in 2019 to secure its space assets. The mission life of GSAT-N2 is 14 years.

The launch will be broadcast on SpaceX’s account on X. The countdown will commence at 11.46pm on Monday and the lift-off will begin at 12.01 am on Tuesday. In case the launch is interrupted for any reason, it will take place at 3.03 pm on Tuesday. The launch window (within which the launch has to be completed, else the next window is utilised) is roughly one hour and 50 minutes.

This is the first time that ISRO is launching a satellite on a SpaceX rocket through its commercial arm New Space India Limited (NSIL). This is also the first time ISRO has built a satellite that only uses the advanced Ka band frequency – a range of radio frequencies between 27 and 40 gigahertz (GHz), which enables the satellite to have higher bandwidth.

Indian space officials are already stationed at Cape Canaveral ahead of the launch. They have sought a dedicated launch and that there will be no co-passenger satellites on the flight.

For the satellite launch, a standard Falcon 9 B-5 rocket, which is 70 metres long and weighs around 549 tonnes, will likely be used during lift-off. It has been designed as a two-stage rocket – a launch vehicle in which two distinct stages provide propulsion consecutively in order to achieve orbital velocity. The rocket can lift up to 8,300 kg to the geosynchronous transfer orbit and 22,800 kilograms to the low earth orbit.

Falcon 9 is a partially reusable rocket and SpaceX asserts “this will be the 19th flight for the Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission. After stage separation, the first stage will land on a drone ship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.”

After the satellite is placed in orbit, India’s Master Control Facility a part of ISRO at Hassan will take control of the satellite and then raise the satellite to its final home 36,000 kilometres above India.

So far, Falcon 9 has been part of 395 launches and has faced just four setbacks, achieving a remarkable success rate of 99%. Experts say that a dedicated launch of a Falcon 9 rocket costs about $70 million on an average.

A man in North Carolina was left astonished after he found a massive, mysterious object on a remote hiking trail. According to the New York Post, Justin Clontz, who is a groundskeeper at a luxury campsite, said he was “shocked” to find the massive object covered in dense metal sheets held together by unearthly-looking bolts.

The debris, which appeared to be covered in burnt carbon fibre, is at least 3 feet wide, about an inch thick, and stands at nearly 4 feet tall, according to the outlet. Though the object was burned, the surrounding area showed no signs of damage.

“It’s once in a lifetime you know, it doesn’t happen every day. We don’t know what it is. We just know that it’s not from up here,” Mr Clontz told a local TV station.

He explained, ”I just tied a rope to it and drugged it out with a lawn mower. It’s a one in a million chance that it lands especially if it landed somewhere off the trail in the woods you’d have never found it, but it just happened to land on the trail.”

See the pic here:
 

Man astonished by finding mysterious object along NC mountain trail
byu/gaukonigshofen inNorthCarolina

Experts speculate the object could have fallen to earth from SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, according to Space.com. Astronomer Jonathon McDowell added on X that the debris ”definitely looks consistent with being a bit of the Crew-7 Dragon’s trunk which reentered on a path right over this location on Tuesday.”

Notably, The Dragon spacecraft consists of two main parts: the capsule and the trunk. The trunk supports the spacecraft during ascent and carries unpressurized cargo. Typically, the trunk burns up in the atmosphere during reentry, but occasionally, parts can survive and fall back to Earth.

The owner of the campsite Glamping Collective said that they plan on reaching out to aerospace experts to figure out what exactly it is and where it came from.

”Space debris was not on our list of things we expected to be having conversations about. The only thing we’ve been able to come up with is that it’s some type of space debris that fell. It doesn’t look like anything off of an aeroplane,” said Matt Bare, owner of The Glamping Collective.

No injuries were reported in connection with the suspected piece of space junk.