|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Angara-1.2 flies its third mission After a nearly two-year break, the light version of the Angara rocket lifted off from Plesetsk on Sept. 17, 2024, at 10:00 Moscow Time, delivering a pair of classified payloads.
The third Angara-1.2 mission at a glance:
In mid-September 2024, Russian authorities issued a navigation warning for several areas that were close to previous drop zones for the Angara-1.2 rocket, flying from Plesetsk. Two areas in the Barents Sea located north-northwest of the Kola Peninsula were likely intended for the impact of the rocket's first stage and for the halves of the payload fairing. Another area in the Northern Pacific would probably be used for the impact of the second stage (INSIDER CONTENT) and for the deorbiting of the AM third stage (INSIDER CONTENT) after the release of its payload. The warnings were declared active from Sept. 17 to 30, 2024. An official TV report covering a visit to Plesetsk launch site by Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu showed a partially assembled Angara-1.2 rocket at the vehicle processing building. On Sept. 17, 2024, the Russian military announced that the launch of the Angara-1.2 rocket with multiple spacecraft for the Ministry of Defense had taken place at 10:00 Moscow Time (07:01 UTC, 3:01 a.m. EDT) and had been a success. It also reported that the spacecraft had been inserted into planned orbits and were under control via ground assets of the Russian Air and Space Forces, VKS. Several hours later, Roskosmos announced the launch of Kosmos-2577 and Kosmos-2578 spacecraft. Several hours after the launch, the US Space Force published orbital elements for two objects associated with the mission with the following parameters:
According to a space flight historian Jonathan McDowell, the satellites were in the Sun-synchronous orbit with a descending node (a point of crossing the Equator from Northern to Southern Hemisphere) matching 22:40 local time. As expected, the Angara's second stage fell into the Pacific Ocean of the coast of Mexico, after reaching around 350 kilometers at the peak of its ballistic trajectory. In the meantime, the AM third stage apparently performed a braking maneuver during its third orbit and reentered the dense atmosphere at around 10:28 UTC (13:28 Moscow, 6:28 a.m. EDT) over the Northern Pacific near Midway Atoll (172 West longitude, 35 North latitude), according to McDowell. The orbital parameters of the newly launched pair closely matched as many as four previous missions, including Kosmos-2551 in 2021, Kosmos-2555 and Kosmos-2560 (INSIDER CONTENT) in 2022 and Kosmos-2568 in 2023. In the following two weeks after launch, ground tracking by US Space Force showed what appeared to be a slow natural decay of both satellites' orbits, but both objects remained in relative proximity from each other, hinting some maneuvering by at least one of the spacecraft to maintain this formation.
|
|
|
