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Delta 4 Rocket Successfully Lofts Clandestine NRO Satellite Into Orbit

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the satellites-flying-backwards dept.

Fnord666 writes:

What caught my eye initially was the unusual track of the flight path.

A United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket climbed into orbit Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with a top secret spy satellite, adding a new set of eyes in the sky for the U.S. government's intelligence community and nudging part of the Delta 4 family closer to retirement.

The 217-foot-tall (66-meter) Delta 4 rocket lifted off at 2:11 p.m. PST (5:11 p.m. EST; 2211 GMT) from Space Launch Complex 6 at Vandenberg on the power of an Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-68A main engine and two Orbital ATK-built solid rocket boosters.

[...] ULA confirmed the flight's successful outcome in a press release around two hours after liftoff.

[...] "It's a classified payload for the NRO," Varghese said in a pre-launch interview. "We can't go into the details of what the payload does, but it's a national security priority, and it's mission will ensure that the warfighters across the globe have the appropriate intel that they need to be able to support operations."

Codenamed NROL-47, the satellite lofted Friday will likely join the NRO's fleet of orbiting radar reconnaissance stations.

The Delta 4's trajectory toward the southwest suggested it was bound for an unusual high-inclination retrograde orbit that would allow the rocket's top secret payload to travel in the opposite direction of Earth's rotation.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/01/13/delta-4-rocket-successfully-lofts-clandestine-nro-satellite-into-orbit/

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:09AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:09AM (#623492)

    ULA has a different patch, with a shark. https://picclick.com/Nrol-47-30-Sw-Ula-Delta-Iv-4-D-Mission-273022667913.html [picclick.com]

  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:40PM

    by looorg (578) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:40PM (#623621)

    That is a bit odd, they seem to have different once for different things. This, the link, seems to be some sort of textile patch for the uniform and the one I linked was the one they had painted onto the rocket. So I guess they differentiate between mission patch and launch patch or something and it's just me being sloppy and using the words willy nilly.