EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — Residents across the Borderland witnessed SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch of the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation earth-observing satellite mission Friday night, Jan. 2.
Residents sent their video of something streaking across the night sky, almost looking like a comet! KTSM 9 viewers shared their photos and videos, seeing the rocket fly past the Southwest.
The launch happened shortly after 7 p.m. MT at the Vandenberg Space Force Base, located over 60 miles west of Santa Barbara, California, according to SpaceX. The mission is for the Italian Space Agency and the Italian Ministry of Defence.
According to a livestream by Spaceflight Now, Falcon 9 left the launch pad southbound, sending the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation satellite into a “circular sun-synchronous orbit.”
A Sun-synchronous orbit is “whenever and wherever the satellite crosses the equator, the local solar time on the ground is always the same,” according to NASA. This causes the angle of the sunlight on the surface of Earth to be as consistent as possible. That means that when photos are captured, people can compare images from different years, different years without worrying about extreme changes…