at 6:38 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (10:38 GMT).The main payload will be a navigation satellite called Nadezhda (Hope) that will become part of Cospas-Sarsat, an international search-and-rescue system designed to pick up distress calls from ships and planes.
Piggybacking on Nadezhda are two experimental spacecraft built by Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL) in England -- SNAP 1 and Tsinghua 1.
SSTL is billing SNAP 1 as the world's most advanced nanosatellite. (A nanosatellite is a spacecraft that weighs between 2 and 22 pounds, or 1 and 10 kilograms.) At 14 pounds (6.5 kilograms), it has features usually found only on larger satellites, including a sophisticated flight-control system, Global Positioning System beacons and gas-powered maneuvering engines. It will have the capability to rendezvous with another spacecraft and inspect it with an array of video cameras. As a test, it will use the mission's other experimental satellite, Tsinghua 1, as a target.
The 130-pound (60-kilogram) Tsinghua 1 spacecraft is intended to demonstrate the capability of monitoring natural and human-made disasters. The experiment may eventually lead a constellation of seven satellites for the global coverage of Earth's climate.
The Chinese satellite was developed under a cooperative program between Tsinghua University and SSTL, aimed at training space technology specialists for Chinese industry.
Rendezvous possibilities
Audrey Nice, SSTL representative said that the technology SNAP 1 is intended to demonstrate has a number of applications in the future.
One of the promising uses for an orbital-rendezvous vehicle would be as a miniature satellite-inspector. Such spacecraft would precede piloted-rescue missions. "You can send back images [from the inspector] and then decide whether it's worth sending a manned mission up," Nice said.
"It also could demonstrate the potential of using clusters of such satellites, which would create a virtual "large" spacecraft," said Nice. "So if you have 50 nanosatellites, they could be doing a work of one huge regular satellite for the fraction of a cost, and with much less risk. If you lose some satellites on launch or [have a] to-orbit malfunction you are not losing the whole spacecraft."
Finally, nanosatellite technology could be used to deorbit orbital junk, such as inactive satellites.
Rendezvous by un-piloted spacecraft is not new in itself, but has not previously been performed by such small spacecraft. The Soviet Union performed the first automated rendezvous in 1967 and since then, Russia has used fully automated systems to dock Soyuz and Progress spacecraft to its space stations. Japan also has tested an automated docking system in orbit.
Launch operations
The two-stage Russian Cosmos 3-M rocket, which will lift all three satellites into an orbit 390 miles (650 kilometers) above Earth, has been a workhorse of the Russian military since the 1960s. It is derived from the R 14 medium-range ballistic missile.
On Monday, Tsinghua 1 and SNAP 1 were integrated onto the Nadezhda spacecraft, from which they will separate shortly after liftoff.
On Tuesday, the fully assembled launch vehicle was rolled out to the launch complex Number 132 for the final processing before blastoff.
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