Rocket Lab will launch an Earth-observing radar satellite for the Japanese company Synspective on Friday (March 20), and you can watch it live.
An Electron rocket topped with one of Synspective’s Strix satellites is scheduled to lift off from Rocket Lab‘s New Zealand site on Friday at 2:10 p.m. EDT (1810 GMT; 7:10 a.m. on March 21 local New Zealand time), on a mission called “Eight Days a Week.”
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Friday’s launch will be the eighth that Rocket Lab conducts for Synspective, which helps explain the mission name.
The Tokyo-based company is building “a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging constellation over Japan that provides data for urban development planning, construction and infrastructure monitoring and disaster response,” Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description.
Rocket Lab has been the sole launch provider to date for the Strix constellation, whose first satellite went up in 2020. (“Strix,” in case you were wondering, is a widespread genus of owls.) Synspective has booked another 20 Electron launches, including “Eight Days a Week,” to finishing assembling the constellation by 2029, according to Rocket Lab.
“Eight Days a Week” will be the 77th launch to date for the 59-foot-tall (18-meter-tall) Electron, which debuted with a test flight in May 2017.
Rocket Lab has also launched seven missions with HASTE, a suborbital version of Electron that allows customers to test hypersonic technologies in the space environment.
<em>Editor’s note: This story was updated at 10:55 a.m. ET on March 19 with the new target launch date of March 20.