Nicholas Kang
Tutorial Publisher
Spaceflight101.com:http://spaceflight101.com/ss-520-4-rocket-launches-on-experimental-mission/
Nasaspaceflight.com:https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/01/jaxa-ss-520-rocket-tricom-1-launch/
SS-520-4 lifted off from the Uchinoura Space Center in Japan’s Kagoshima prefecture at 8:33 a.m. local time on Sunday, 23:33 UTC on Saturday on a one-off demonstration mission, aiming to put the TRICOM-1 CubeSat into an elliptical orbit around Earth.
The rocket’s climb to orbit was expected to take seven and a half minutes, however, all telemetry from the ascending launch vehicle was lost around 20 seconds into the planned 31-second firing of the rocket’s first stage. Tracking of the rocket showed the first stage separated from the second stage, reaching a peak altitude just shy of 200 Kilometers before both fell into the Pacific Ocean in a closed zone south-east of the launch site.
This was the fourth orbital launch attempt of 2017 and the first failure of the year – though as an experimental mission utilizing low-cost technology, a launch failure had always been a possibility.
Here is the launch video:
