NASA Delays Launch Of Space Weather Monitoring Twin Satellite

NASA has postponed the launch of TRACERS (photo: dock. NASA)

NASA was supposed to launch a TRACERS mission on Wednesday, July 23 at around 01.13 WIB. However, the launch of this satellite had to be canceled due to the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA).

In a recent release, NASA said that the FAA was concerned about weather conditions that were deemed "unable". To avoid accidents at launch, NASA decided to postpone its flight schedule.

TRACERS will launch a day later, namely on Thursday, July 24. With the same launch time, the satellite will take off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California using a Falcon 9 rocket.

TRACERS, abbreviation of the Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, is an important mission for NASA researchers. Consisting of twin satellites, the project was launched to study magnetic reconnection around Earth.

This is a process of exchanging energy of an electrically charged plasma in Earth's atmosphere. By studying and understanding this, researchers were able to find out how the solar wind of the Sun interacts with the magnetosphere, Earth's protective magnetic shield.

Space weather has had many impacts on Earth, but has had most of a bad impact. Unstable weather can disrupt communication infrastructure such as satellites and GPS systems. Power grids on Earth can also be affected.

Once stationed in space, twin satellites of TRACERS will fly side by side and always face the Sun. They will pass through areas where Earth's magnetic fields are open above the north and south poles.

Both will measure magnetic reconnection as much as 3,000 times in just the first year. All data collected will be used to assist scientists in observing how rapidly reconnection changes and evolves.