The Vulcan rocket checks off a number of vital packing containers for the House Drive. First, it depends totally on US-made rocket engines. The Atlas V rocket it’s changing makes use of Russian-built important engines, and given the chilled relations between the 2 powers, US officers have lengthy desired to cease utilizing Russian engines to energy the Pentagon’s satellites into orbit. Second, ULA says the Vulcan rocket will finally present a heavy-lift launch functionality at a decrease price than the corporate’s now-retired Delta IV Heavy rocket.
Third, Vulcan offers the House Drive with a substitute for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, which have been the one rockets of their class out there to the navy because the final nationwide safety mission was launched on an Atlas V rocket one 12 months in the past.
Col. Jim Horne, mission director for the USSF-106 launch, mentioned this flight marks a “fairly historic level in our program’s historical past. We formally finish our reliance on Russian-made important engines with this launch, and we proceed to take care of our assured entry to house with a minimum of two impartial rocket service corporations that we are able to leverage to get our capabilities on orbit.”
What’s onboard?
The House Drive has solely acknowledged one of many satellites aboard the USSF-106 mission, however there are extra payloads cocooned contained in the Vulcan rocket’s fairing.
The $250 million mission that officers are keen to speak about is known as Navigation Know-how Satellite tv for pc-3, or NTS-3. This experimental spacecraft will check new satellite tv for pc navigation applied sciences that will finally discover their means on next-generation GPS satellites. A key focus for engineers who designed and can function the NTS-3 satellite tv for pc is to take a look at methods of overcoming GPS jamming and spoofing, which may degrade satellite tv for pc navigation indicators utilized by navy forces, business airliners, and civilian drivers.
“We’ll be doing, we anticipate, over 100 completely different experiments,” mentioned Joanna Hinks, senior analysis aerospace engineer on the Air Drive Analysis Laboratory’s house automobiles directorate, which manages the NTS-3 mission. “Among the main areas we’re taking a look at—we now have an electronically steerable phased array antenna in order that we are able to ship greater energy to get by interference to the situation that it is wanted.”
Arlen Biersgreen, then-program supervisor for the NTS-3 satellite tv for pc mission on the Air Drive Analysis Laboratory, presents a one-third scale mannequin of the NTS-3 spacecraft to an viewers in 2022.
Credit score:
US Air Drive/Andrea Rael
GPS jamming is very an issue in and close to conflict zones. Investigators probing the crash of Azerbaijan Airways Flight 8243 final December decided GPS jamming, doubtless by Russian navy forces trying to counter a Ukrainian drone strike, interfered with the plane’s navigation because it approached its vacation spot within the Russian republic of Chechnya. Azerbaijani authorities officers blamed a Russian surface-to-air missile for damaging the plane, in the end resulting in a crash in close by Kazakhstan that killed 38 folks.
“We’ve a lot of completely different superior indicators that we’ve designed,” Hinks mentioned. “A kind of is the Chimera anti-spoofing sign… to guard civil customers from spoofing that’s affecting so many plane worldwide in the present day, in addition to ships.”
The NTS-3 spacecraft, developed by L3Harris and Northrop Grumman, solely takes up a fraction of the Vulcan rocket’s capability. The satellite tv for pc weighs lower than 3,000 kilos (about 1,250 kilograms), a couple of quarter of what this model of the Vulcan rocket can ship to geosynchronous orbit.
