/sci/ - Science & Math

NASA selects SpaceX for rideshare launch of smallsat mission, Rosetta crashed into a comet purposefully 7 years ago
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https://spacenews.com/nasa-selects-spacex-for-rideshare-launch-of-smallsat-mission/
> WASHINGTON — NASA has selected SpaceX to launch a pair of smallsats to study space weather as part of a rideshare mission in 2025.
> NASA announced Sept. 29 that it awarded SpaceX a task order to launch the Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites (TRACERS), a pair of smallsats that will study space weather and the magnetosphere from low Earth orbit.
> NASA selected TRACERS in 2019 as a heliophysics Small Explorer, or SMEX, mission, with a cost of no more than $115 million. At the time it was planned to launch as a secondary payload with another SMEX mission, the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH). In August 2022, though, NASA said that PUNCH would fly on the same Falcon 9 as an agency astrophysics mission, the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) in 2025.
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https://www.space.com/39251-on-this-day-in-space.html
> On This Day In Space: Sept. 30, 2016: Rosetta spacecraft crashes into a comet
> Rosetta launched in 2004 and spent 10 years chasing down Comet 67P, a rubber-duck-shaped space rock that orbits the sun between Earth and Jupiter.