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posted by mrpg on Monday February 05 2018, @07:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the sugoi-ze! dept.

Souped-up sounding rocket lifts off from Japan with tiny satellite

A modified sounding rocket originally designed to loft science instruments on high-altitude suborbital arcs blasted off Saturday from the Uchinoura Space Center in southern Japan and soared into orbit to become the world's smallest satellite launcher.

[...] Standing just 31 feet (9.5 meters) tall and spanning around 20 inches (52 centimeters) in diameter, the SS-520-5 rocket was modest by launcher standards. With Saturday's successful flight, the solid-fueled booster became the smallest rocket to ever put an object in orbit around Earth.

A student-built shoebox-sized CubeSat named TRICOM 1R — weighing in at about 10 pounds (3 kilograms) — was mounted on top of the SS-520-5 rocket for liftoff from the Uchinoura Space Center in Japan's Kagoshima prefecture.

[...] The SS-520 is designed to propel more than 300 pounds (140 kilograms) of science research instrumentation to an altitude of nearly 500 miles (800 kilometers) for a few minutes of exposure to space before falling back to Earth. Engineers added a third stage on top of the basic SS-520 booster to give it the capability to reach orbital speeds of more than 17,000 mph (27,000 kilometers per hour).

Also at The Verge.

Related: Rocket Lab's Second "Electron" Rocket Launch Succeeds, Reaches Orbit


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 05 2018, @07:20AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 05 2018, @07:20AM (#633185) Journal

    Can I buy such a rocket from a toy store?
    (actually I wonder what the cost for the launch may be? How does it compare with launching heaps of nanosats from a heavy rocket?)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @10:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @10:59AM (#633228)

    Nanosats... ouch... just the ticket for someone who wants to take out satellites... just steer a nanosat into its path.