We have another exciting Atlas V launch today, this time from Vandenburg Air Force Base off the East coast of the United States! This launch will be the baseline Atlas V, the “401” configuration, no side boosters and a single engine centaur stage.
The payload, the Worldview-4 commercial Earth observations Satellite, will be launched into a sun synchronous polar orbit – that is, an orbit crossing the poles of the planet that is also designed to sync up with the sun, so that images always have effectively the same lighting no matter when they are taken over the course of the satellites mission.
The Centaur stage will also be carrying on it a set of cubesats, small micro-satellites that conduct various specialized experiments. As always, it should be an awesome launch, which of course I will be live tweeting and recapping here later tonight.
Update: September 16th launch date has been scrubbed.
For now, as always, enjoy the mission profile video for this flight!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldView-4