Rocket Lab will launch its sixth mission for the Japanese Earth-imaging company iQPS this afternoon (Nov. 5), and you can watch the action live.<\/p>\n
An Electron<\/a> rocket carrying the QPS-SAR-14 satellite<\/a>, nicknamed Yachihoko-I, is scheduled to lift off from Rocket Lab’s New Zealand site today at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT; 8:45 a.m. on Nov. 6. local New Zealand time).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rocket Lab<\/a> will webcast the launch<\/a>, beginning about 30 minutes before liftoff. Space.com will carry the feed as well, if, as expected, the company makes it available.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n If all goes to plan today, the Electron’s “kick stage” will deploy Yachihoko-I into a circular, 357-mile-high (575 kilometers) orbit about 50 minutes after launch.<\/p>\n “This satellite will join the rest of the QPS-SAR constellation in providing high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and Earth monitoring services globally,” Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description<\/a>. “iQPS aims to build a constellation of 36 SAR satellites that will provide near-real-time images of Earth every 10 minutes.”<\/p>\n Yachihoko-I will be the 13th (not 14th, as it name implies) iQPS satellite to reach orbit to date. Seven members of the growing constellation have flown atop non-Electron rockets to date \u2014 India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, Japan’s Epsilon and SpaceX’s Falcon 9<\/a>, to be specific.<\/p>\n Yachihoko-I takes its name from the Japanese god of nation-building, according to Rocket Lab. That explains the moniker the company gave to today’s mission: “The Nation God Navigates.”<\/p>\n Today’s launch will be the 16th of 2025 for Rocket Lab and the company’s 74th overall to date. The vast majority of these have been conducted by the 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron. Rocket Lab also operates a suborbital version of the vehicle known as HASTE<\/a> (“Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron”), which has flown five times since debuting in June 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rocket Lab will launch its sixth mission for the Japanese Earth-imaging company iQPS this afternoon (Nov. 5), and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-245643","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}