Ronnie Foreman retweetledi
I'm excited to announce we have achieved our Tier 1 mission success criteria and have begun gathering a tremendous amount of data on how this brand new spacecraft performs.
On March 30th, 13:17:08Z, the Gravitas spacecraft separated from the SpaceX Transporter-16 stack to begin its mission as one of the highest power free-flying satellites ever launched.
Immediately after separation, the spacecraft autonomously:
- Executed detumbling maneuvers
- Established two-way communications with the ground (on our very first ground station pass)
- Deployed its 20kW solar arrays
- Slewed to a safe and stable attitude to await further ground commands
These actions alone are a testament to the incredible work of our in-house engineering, software, and GNC teams to build a robust spacecraft.
Since then, our operations team completed all initial system activations and checkouts, confirming the vehicle is in a power positive and thermally stable state with no major anomalies observed at this time.
We completed this phase of the mission ahead of schedule. Next up we will be powering up and downlinking data for all payloads aboard the Gravitas spacecraft in support of our customers and partners while continuing to put the spacecraft through its paces.
As we noted ahead of launch: The goal of this mission is to experiment and push our systems to the limit to inform future missions. I look forward to sharing more on our successes and challenges as the mission proceeds.
Video of our satellite below; link to full T-16 webcast: x.com/SpaceX/status/…
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