Maxar-built Intelsat 40e and its hosted payload TEMPO arrived safely at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
The Maxar-built Intelsat 40e and its hosted pollution-monitoring NASA payload arrived at Kennedy Space Center yesterday. Intelsat 40e and the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit in April.
Based on Maxar’s proven 1300-class satellite platform and Intelsat Epic, Intelsat 40e will provide Intelsat customers across North and Central America with flexible, high-throughput coast-to-coast coverage. The additional capacity will also support Intelsat’s growing demand for solving connectivity challenges for commercial and private planes, moving vehicles on land and other mobility applications.
The launch of this satellite will also mark another important milestone for environmental monitoring across North America. Intelsat 40e hosts TEMPO, a pairing made possible by Maxar after the company was commissioned to host the instrument. TEMPO is a UV-visible spectrometer that will detect pollutants across North America, with the resulting data used to enhance air-quality forecasts. The satellite and instrument have both completed testing together at Maxar’s Palo Alto location.
You can watch Intelsat 40e and TEMPO launch on NASA TV and SpaceX’s YouTube channel.
All of Intelsat 40e’s reflectors are deployed, and TEMPO is seen in the foreground, as the spacecraft completed checkouts in an antenna test range at Maxar’s manufacturing facility in Palo Alto, California..
This rendering shows what Intelsat 40e and TEMPO will look like once operational in orbit.
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