"Falcon Heavy" that launched the "Viassat-3" American Star
At 08:26 on May 1, 2023, Beijing time, the Falcon Heavy carrier rocket carrying the main star "Viasat-3" America (ViaSat-3 Americas) communication satellite and the star "Arcturus" communication satellite and GS-1 CubeSat, launched from the LC-39A station of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and about 4 hours and 47 minutes later, "Viasat-3", GS-1, and "Shepherd" completed their separation. The satellite enters a low-geostationary orbit (N-GEO) at an altitude of 34,620 km.
"Viazat-3" American Star
The ViaSat-3/ViaSat-3 high-throughput satellite is owned by Viasat Inc. of the United States, using the Boeing Satellite Systems 702MP+ satellite platform, carrying a payload independently developed by ViaSat, with a launch mass of about 6.3 tons. In terms of energy systems, equipped with two solar wings with a wingspan of 144 feet (about 44 meters), it is one of the largest solar wings ever launched into space, each containing 8 solar panels, with a total power generation of more than 25 kilowatts, making it one of the most powerful satellites ever built. The propulsion system is equipped with an all-electric propulsion system.
Schematic diagram of "Viasat-3"
In terms of load, it is equipped with a huge reflective antenna, which is one of the world's largest reflective antennas in orbit, which can reuse more satellite bandwidth, while user downlinks can go down to more locations. At the same time, it is equipped with a longer sail pole to support the reflective antenna, which is enlarged on the James Webb sunshade sail pole. The satellite uses the Ka-band and can provide more than 1Tbps of communication capacity (125GB of data per second), making it the world's highest communication capacity satellite. Viasat-3 communicates three times faster than the Viasat-2 satellite, which was launched in 2017.
In this mission, the carrying star "Arcturus" (also known as Aurora 4A), developed by the owner of the United States Astranis Space Technologies, is the first small geosynchronous orbit satellite in Astrañs (MicroGEO Satellite), with a launch mass of about 0.4 tons. The satellite uses a proprietary software-defined radio payload, a unique digital payload that supports flexible frequency allocation and range adjustment. The size and cost of the Vester satellite is only 1/20 of the traditional GEO communication satellite, which typically costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
In addition, the mission carried GS-1 CubeSats from Gravity Space. Including three satellites and payload mounts, the total payload mass of this mission exceeds 7 tons.
The Falcon Heavy rocket, a heavy-duty two-stage semi-bundled launch vehicle developed by Space Exploration Technologies Inc (SpaceX), is based on the Falcon 9 symmetrically bundled with two core-stage boosters. The arrow is 70 meters long, the core and core booster diameters are 3.66 meters, the fairing diameter is 5.2 meters, the maximum width is 12.2 meters, the takeoff mass is about 1421 tons, the maximum takeoff thrust is about 2328 tons, and its standard geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) capacity is 26.7 tons.
Due to the excessive load, it is necessary to send directly to the GEO, and the two core stage boosters (B1052.8, B1053.3) and core stage (B1068.1) of this rocket are not recovered.
Author: Dabai Gao Guo