United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V will conduct a clandestine launch in support of the US National Reconnaissance Office Thursday, its second mission in a fortnight in support of the agency that maintains America’s fleet of spy satellites. Liftoff of NROL-52 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is scheduled for a fifty-three-minute window opening at 04:07 Eastern time (08:07 UTC).
Thursday’s launch will carry out the NROL-52 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), deploying an unspecified payload into Earth orbit. The sixth flight of Atlas this year, Thursday’s launch follows the successful deployment of the NROL-42 mission – whose payload is now designated USA-278 – from Vandenberg Air Force Base in late September.
The NRO rarely releases any details of its spacecraft, and NROL-52 – or NRO Launch 52 – is no exception.
Officially, NROL-52 is a classified mission being conducted in the interests of national security. Despite this secrecy, experts and amateur observers are often able to identify different classes of spacecraft, track the satellites in orbit and make deductions about their missions and some of their capabilities.
These deductions have been aided by occasional leaks from within the US intelligence community – such as documents released by Edward Snowden to the Washington Post in 2013 that revealed the names and budgets of many of the NRO’s satellite programs.
As Thursday’s launch is taking place from Cape Canaveral, it is unlikely to be carrying an imaging satellite. Optical imaging payloads typically use a near-polar sun-synchronous orbit which provides consistent lighting conditions and allows a satellite to observe most of the planet’s surface, while the current-generation Topaz radar-imaging satellites use a retrograde orbit, flying east-to-west around the planet.
Neither of these orbits can easily be reached from Cape Canaveral, so the west-coast Vandenberg Air Force Base is used instead to launch these missions.
