SpaceX’s 23 mission with the Falcón 9 spacecraft that includes the Puerto Rico Cubesat NanoRocks2 (PR-CuNaR2) satellite, designed and built by Puerto Rican hands, has been postponed until early Sunday morning due to weather conditions in the Cabo.Canaveral area of Florida.
PR-CuNaR2 was designed and developed by students and Professor Amilcar Rincon Charis of the College of Engineering at the Bayamon Campus of the Pan American University of Puerto Rico. The launch was rescheduled for 3:14 a.m. Sunday morning from the Kennedy Space Center.
The professor and students were ready this morning for the historic event, when the SpaceX Twitter account announced the launch was postponed due to weather conditions in the area. In an interview with Wapa Televisión, Puerto Ricans showed the resignation of the postponement, although they hope that the launch will come true tomorrow that will take their satellite into space, which for the next two years will orbit the Earth and study the origin and evolution of the planets. stars and asteroids.
“Today that was not possible, but we have hope for tomorrow, 20 minutes before today. It felt like a practice, tomorrow we will be here again, and we will remain so until it is launched,” explained Professor Rincon Charis.
Once the launch is complete, the satellite will make a roughly nine-hour journey from Earth to the International Space Station. There you will be escorted by an astronaut who will keep you at the station until approximately September or October. An extendable arm will then be used to take the satellite into space at an altitude of 400 km.
In space, the satellite orbits the Earth every hour and a half. That is, it will orbit about 16 times around the Earth in one day. It remains there for about two years until it disintegrates in the atmosphere.
The satellite weighs 5.6 pounds and is four inches wide, four inches long and 12 inches high. “It’s a small satellite with all the components like a large communications satellite that we know, which we’re going to carry out a scientific mission to assess how particles behave in microgravity,” he explained to metro the teacher Charis’ Corner.
About 65 students were involved in the development of PR-CuNaR2, which began in 2018, although the design-and-build prototype began in 2013.
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