<\/p>\n Rocket Lab<\/a> will stream the proceedings live, starting at about 30 minutes before liftoff. You can watch via the company<\/a>, and Space.com will carry the feed as well if it’s made available.<\/p>\n This will be Rocket Lab’s ninth launch for iQPS, which is building a constellation of 36 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites in low Earth orbit<\/a> (LEO). Such spacecraft can study Earth day or night, and they can peer through cloud cover as well.<\/p>\n The iQPS network “is being developed and deployed at a rapid pace to provide high resolution and near-real time SAR imagery to its global users,” Rocket Lab wrote in a description of today’s mission<\/a>, which it calls “The Lightning God Defends.”<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n That name is a reference to the satellite going up today: It’s nicknamed SUSANOO-II, after a Japanese lightning god.<\/p>\n If all goes according to plan, the Electron’s upper “kick stage” will deploy SUSANOO-II about 50 minutes after launch, at an altitude of 357 miles (575 kilometers).<\/p>\n Today’s flight will be Rocket Lab’s 14th of 2026 and 93rd overall. The company’s most recent launch, on Aug. 6<\/a>, also lofted an iQPS satellite to LEO.<\/p>\n The vast majority of the company’s flights have been performed by Electron, a 59-foot-tall (18 meters) rocket that gives small satellites dedicated rides to Earth orbit and beyond. Rocket Lab also operates a suborbital variant of Electron called HASTE<\/a>, which allows customers to test sensors and other tech in the hypersonic flight environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rocket Lab will launch a private Japanese Earth-observing satellite to orbit this morning (Aug. 20), and you can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":["post-590230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Space\"](\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/media\/img\/spc-logo-w.svg\"){kind=logo}
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