The Russian Ministry of Defense sends a secret payload into orbit Soyuzu missiles Thursday (Sept. 9), according to state media company TASS.
The spacecraft was launched Thursday (September 9) at 3:59 p.m. EDT (1959 GMT or 22:59 Moscow time) from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, Russian. TASS laporan report determined.
“In the interests of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Soyuz-2.1v light-class launch vehicle successfully put the spacecraft into orbit at the calculated time,” says the brief (machine-translated from Russian).
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Other reports from Barents Observer found that the fairing of the massive missile payload had to splash somewhere in the northwest Barents Sea in northern Russia after launch.
Russian space observer Anatoly Zak who runs the website Russian space network, wrote that the spacecraft known as Kosmos-2551 or EMKA has a mass of 330 pounds (150 kilograms) and will be near polar orbit for reconnaissance purposes. (The benefit of having a polar orbit is that over time, the Earth rotates under the spacecraft, making the entire planet visible.)
“This is believed to be the first Razbeg imaging satellite, the operational successor to the EMKA Kosmos-2525 test satellite,” said astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. tweeted.
Kosmos-2551 was delayed after three launch opportunities in July and is expected to fly in low-Earth orbit between 198 miles (319 kilometers) and 215 miles (347 kilometers) above the planet. For comparison, the International Space Station’s tilted equatorial orbit is about 200 miles (450 km).
This is the second EMKA satellite, Zak words on the Russian Space Web. NS first start on March 29, 2018, “apparently designed to test a new miniature earth imaging system.” This satellite, known as Kosmos-2525, reentered Earth’s atmosphere on April 1, 2021, according to Western data sources cited by Zak. The new launch could thus be a replacement for these older spacecraft.
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