The Volcan missile examines many important boxes of space power. First, it depends entirely on the missile engines in the United States. The ATLAS V missile that replaces the main engines created by Russian, and given the refrigerated relations between the two powers, US officials have long wanted to stop using Russian engines to operate the Pentagon satellites in orbit. Second, Ula says that the Volcan missile will eventually save heavy ability at a lower cost of the company now retired for the company.
Third, Volcan provides space power as a substitute for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy from Spacex, which was the only missile in its semester available to the army since the last national security mission was launched on the ATLAS v missile one year ago.
Colonel Jim Horn, the mission manager for the launch of the USF-106, said this trip represents “a beautiful historical point in the history of our program. We formally end our dependence on Russian major engines with this launch, and we continue to maintain our guaranteed access to space with at least two companies of independent missile service companies that we can benefit from to obtain our capabilities on orbit. “
What is on the plane?
The space force did not acknowledge, but one of the satellites aboard the USSF-106 mission, but there are more loads filled with the Volcan missile.
The $ 250 million task that officials want to talk is the name Savigeation Technology Satellite-3 or NTS-3. This experimental spacecraft will test navigation techniques via new satellite satellites, which may eventually find their way to GPS moons from the next generation. The main focus of engineers who designed and manages the NTS-3 satellite is to take a look at the ways to overcome GPS jamming and deception, which can land from satellite navigation signals used by military forces, commercial companies and civilian drivers.
“We’ll do, we expect, more than 100 different experiences,” said Joanna Henix, chief air astronaut at the Air Force Research Laboratory, which runs the NTS-3 mission. “Some of the main areas we look – we have an arrival antenna on electronically so that we can provide higher energy to interfere with the site you need.”
Arlen Biersgreen, then the program manager at the NTS-3 satellite mission in the Air Force Research Laboratory, offers a model for a third of the NTS-3 spacecraft to an audience in 2022.
Credit: US Air Force/Andrea Ryle
GPS is a special problem in war and nearby areas. Investigators looking for a crash Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 Last December, GPS determined the jamming, most likely by the Russian military forces trying to face a Ukrainian drone blow, entering the navigation of the plane as it approached its destination in the Russian Republic of Chechnya. Azerbaijani government officials blamed a Russian missile to a pilot to destroy the plane, ultimately, in the nearby Kazakhstan, which killed 38 people.
“We have a number of different advanced signs that we designed,” Henix said. “One of these exclusive signals is to protect civilian users from deception that affects many aircraft around the world today, as well as ships.”
NTS-3 spacecraft, developed by L3ARRIRIS and Northrop Grumman, occupies only a small part of the Volcan missile capacity. The satellite weight is less than 3000 pounds (about 1250 kg), about a quarter of what this version can provide from the Volcan missile to the simultaneous geographical orbit.