Cygnus CRS-11 (NG-11, SS Roger Chaffee)

Launch data:

Description:

• Orbital Sciences CYGNUS CRS Flight 11, is the 12 flight of the Orbital ATK unmanned resupply spacecraft Cygnus and its 11 flight to the International Space Station under the Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA. Orbital and NASA jointly developed a new space transportation system to provide commercial cargo resupply services to the International Space Station (ISS).
• This is the last mission from the extended CRS contract; followup missions are part of the CRS2 contract. NG-11 was also the first mission to utilize the Antares twenty four hour prior load where critical hardware could be loaded into Cygnus just twenty four hours prior to launch. The spacecraft for the NG-11 is named the S.S. Roger Chaffee after Roger Chaffee who lost his life during training for the Apollo 1 mission.

Mission details:

• On Apr 17, 2019 the 10th Antares rocket took off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, placing Cygnus NG-11 (the S.S. Roger Chaffee) in low orbit at 2053 UTC and separating from the payload at 2055 UTC. The Chaffee reached the ISS on Apr 19, with SSRMS grapple at 0928 UTC and berthing on Unity nadir at about 1130 UTC. The NG-11 mission carries a large number of nanosatellites hosted on a variety of dispenser system.
  • Four Planetary Systems Corp. CSD 3U deployers were attached to the Antares second stage, and ejected their payloads, SASSI2 and 12 ThinSats, at 2059 UTC Apr 17. Unusually, the payloads were not cataloged by US space tracking, and were expected to have reentered by around Apr 24.
  • SASSI-2 (Student Aerothermal Spectrometer Satellite of Illinois and Indiana, correctly written as SASSI-superscript-2) is a 3U cubesat from the University of Illinois to study the diffuse bow shock of a satellite in low orbit.
  • The ThinSats are a new design from NearSpaceLaunch for the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority and carry student experiments. Twelve Thinsats were deployed. Each is made of a number of Thinsat cases 0.01 x 0.11 x 0.11m in size connected by solar panel ribbons 0.30m long 0.05m wide. The satellites are launched folded up and deploy after ejection in an accordion-like fashion.
    The twelve satellites include:
    • Three Thinsat 3T (1B,1G,1K), consisting of three Thinsat cases connected by two ribbons. Overall mass 1 kg, size 0.01 x 0.1 x 1.3m.
    • Six Thinsat 6T (1C,1D,1F,1H,1J,1L), consisting of six Thinsat cases connect by five ribbons. Overall mass 2 kg, size 0.01 x 0.1 x 2.7m
    • Three Thinsat D+4T (1A, 1E, 1I), consisting of five Thinsat cases (one of them a double-width 0.03 x 0.11 x 0.11m case) connected by 4 ribbons. Overall mass 2 kg, size (0.01-0.03) x 0.1 x 2.2m.
  • The JAXA J-SSOD No. 11 dispenser will be delivered to the Kibo module for later deployment.
    It contains three 1U cubesats developed by Kyushu Tech students: Uguisu, for Kyushu Tech Raavana-1, for the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Modern Technologies, Moratuwa, Sri Lanka; Nepalisat-1, for the Nepal Academy of Space Technology, Kathmandu.
  • The Nanoracks NRCSD-16 payload will also be delivered to the Kibo module for later deployment.
    It includes:
    • Aeternitas (1U, Old Dominion University, Virginia);
    • Libertas (1U, University of Virginia);
    • Ceres (1U, Virginia Polytechnic);
    • KRAKsat (1U, Kraksat team and Akademia Gorniczo-Hutnicza, Krakow, Poland) with a ferrofluid attitude control system experiment.
    • Swiatowid (2U, SatRevolution, Wroclaw, Poland), with a 4m res Earth imager.
    • IOD-1 GEMS, Orbital Microsystems (Boulder, Colorado and Harwell, UK; 3U from ClydeSpace), with a passive microwave weather sensor.
    • EntrySat (2U from Institut superieur de l′aeronautique et de l′espace, Toulouse), to study the atmospheric reentry environment.
  • The Nanoracks NRCSD-E mission 7 is attached to the Chaffee′s service module.
    Its payloads are:
    • Aerocube-10a, a 1.5U cubesat from the Aerospace Corp containing 29 small subsatellites (AC-10a Probe 01 to 29), each 0.016 kg and 0.1m in diameter, which will be ejected to serve as radar targets to study atmospheric density. AC-10a also has an optical beacon to serve as a target for AC-10b.
    • Aerocube-10b, a 1.5U cubesat with a steam thruster, to carry out proximity manuevering near AC-10a.
    • Seeker, a 3U cubesat from NASA JSC to serve as an inspector satellite maneuvering in the vicinity of the Chaffee.
    • Kenobi, a 3U cubesat from NASA JSC which will remain attached to the NRCSD-E and will relay data from Seeker.
  • Finally, the SEOPS LLC Slingshot system will be attached to the Chaffee before it departs ISS, and will deploy further cubesats whose identities have not yet been revealed. These cubesats will be delivered to ISS on the next Dragon.
• On Aug 6, 2019 the Canadarm-2 unberthed the S.S. Roger Chaffee (Cygnus NG-11) from the Unity module at 1330 UTC and released it into orbit at 1615 UTC.
• On Aug 29, 2019 the Aerocube-10a satellite, released from Cygnus NG-11, itself released its first atmospheric probe, labelled Venturini in the US satellite catalog.
  On Sep 16 Cygnus NG-11 released the Seeker cubesat, which was designed to perform proximity operations with Cygnus.
• The launch of Cygnus NG-12 on 01 Nov, also mark a unique occasion for as many as two Cygnuses to be in space simultaneously. The NG-11 spacecraft, unberthed from the ISS in August, but has since been flying independently to complete a multi-month “secondary mission”, which involves the deployment of several CubeSats via the Slingshot CubeSat Deployer System and the NanoRacks external CubeSat deployer. NG-11 is due to re-enter the atmosphere to destruction in December. According to Northrop Grumman Corp., the extended flight demonstrates the “capability to fly two Cygnus vehicles simultaneously and support hosted payloads for longer periods of time”, as well as reinforcing the spacecraft′s ability “to serve a robust and growing commercial economy in low-Earth orbit”.
  
  

  The NG-11 spacecraft, is pictured at the left of this view, taken from the ISS earlier in 2019. Photo Credit: NASA

• On Dec 5, 2019 at 1840 UTC the S.S. Roger Chaffee (Cygnus NG-11) lowered its orbit from 462 x 469 km to 212 x 376 km; on Dec 6, probably about 1620 UTC, it was deorbited over the south Pacific with impact near 140W 45S at about 1655 UTC.
  NG-11 arrived at ISS Apr 19, 2019 and left on Aug 6, spending time demonstrating extended operations.

External links:

• Wikipedia: Cygnus CRS-11
• Orbital_com: Cygnus fact sheet
• AmericaSpace: Launch NG-11 Cygnus, Honors Apollo 1 Hero Roger Chaffee

Astrophilately covers:

Launch NG-11, cancel Wallops Island. Credit: #402