alidor
27.04.2021 4:56:48
The Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star (WAGB 10), transits the Chukchi Sea, in the Arctic, at noon Sunday, Dec. 20, 2020. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Cynthia Oldham.
See full version: Polar Star arrives in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, for first visit since 2013
The Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star (WAGB 10), transits the Chukchi Sea, in the Arctic, at noon Sunday, Dec. 20, 2020. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Cynthia Oldham.
Mitigating the risk of potential exposure to COVID19 is paramount for the mission’s continued success – and for the safety of the citizens of Dutch Harbor. here
BERING SEA – The Seattle-based Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star (WAGB 10) arrived in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, Tuesday, for a logistics stop 30 days into a months-long Arctic deployment to protect the nation’s maritime sovereignty and security throughout the polar region.
Later on, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket successfully landed on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship. SpaceX posted the landing video on the company’s official Twitter account — still mesmerizes. Other space flight companies and government bodies have yet to achieve this level of precision in Rocket engineering.
Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral Space Port Sation, Florida — SpaceX made history again by sending a record number of 143 satellites on a single mission to the lower Earth orbit yesterday. The record was previously held by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) with 103 satellites on a single launch.
All sats launched next year will have laser links. Only our polar sats have lasers this year & are v0.9.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 25, 2021here
These laser links are purely intended for satellite-to-satellite communications for Starlink. They are not (at least at this time, and for the foreseeable future) intended for ground-to-satellite communications.The value that sat-to-sat laser links provide is that they create a low latency, high bandwidth path that stays within the Starlink satellite network. Before these 10 satellites, each Starlink satellite has only been capable of communicating directly to ground terminals (either consumer, transit or SpaceX control). For traffic that is intended to move large geographic distances (think transcontinental), this can require several hops back and forth between ground and space, or the traffic from the user terminal is exited at a node that is geared for transiting traffic and most of the data transits along with existing ground Internet links.By performing this type of transit directly in space, and exiting at a transit node nearest the destination for the data, you greatly reduce latency. Bandwidth still might not be great, but what this does is unlocks a very financially lucrative consumer use case: low latency finance traffic and critical communications. There are many use cases around the world where shaving even 10-20 milliseconds of latency on a data path can unlock finance and emergency capabilities, and this is a long-fought battle throughout the history of these industries. As an example, if you got a piece of news about a company in Australia, and wanted to trade on it as quickly as possible in the USA if you can beat your competitors by 10-20 milliseconds, that can mean a lot of money.Laser comms for Starlink sats have long been planned, but have historically proven to be quite hard to get working. They also depend on a sufficient critical mass of satellites so that a given satellite actually does have another satellite within the lock to send the traffic towards. u/snoshy via Hacker News discussion.
Elon Musk‘s space exploration & commercial spaceflight company has used optical laser-linking of the satellites for the first time. Musk has confirmed on Twitter that the black pipe-type objects at the end of each Starlink satellite are actually laser links. I have marked these objects in the following photo of the SmallSat satellite stack photo shared by SpaceX before the launch. here
Update: u/snoshy provided much-needed insight on the use of ‘laser links’ on Starlink satellites as the article made it to the HN front page.
And so, instead of taking off to the east or northeast after its 3:31 p.m. EDT liftoff, the Falcon 9 raced away on a southeasterly trajectory and then carried out a "dogleg" maneuver once clear of Florida's coast to bend the flight path more directly south.
SpaceX charges $1 million to accommodate payloads weighing less than 200 kilograms, or 440 pounds, and $5,000 for each additional kilogram, or 2.2 pounds. [links]
The first "Transporter" rideshare mission was launched in January , putting 143 small satellites into orbit. [links]
The first stage fell away two-and-a-half minutes after launch, flipped around and fired three of its nine engines to reverse course and head back to Cape Canaveral. The second stage, powered by a single engine, carried out two firings to reach the planned 326-mile-high orbit just under an hour after liftoff. more
“The value is that if we find an issue, it can be fixed and resolved, and the cost is probably two orders of magnitude less than if you found it when you had equipment on the ship, and then you had to go and make physical changes,” said Shaun Horning , CEO of Gastops.
The Polar Star travels to the McMurdo Station, Antarctica, every year to lead Operation Deep Freeze and break miles of ice up to 21 feet (6.4 m) thick. [links]
The ship is powered by three aviation-grade gas turbine engines of up to 75,000 horsepower, the most powerful engine the Coast Guard currently possesses. [links]
Canadian company Gastops will collect data on the Polar Star and create a 1:1 digital replica of the ship. more