An Antonov Airlines-owned An-124 Ruslan strategic airlift aircraft has transported a satellite built by the Maxar company (United States) from Palo Alto (California, United States) to the Kennedy Space Center (Florida, United States).
The Maxar-built Intelsat 40e satellite and its hosted pollution-monitoring NASA payload—a Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument—will ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit in April, Maxar said in a statement, the CFTS portal reports.
The satellite will perform two primary functions. First, it 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.
Second, TEMPO, which is a UV-visible spectrometer, will detect pollutants across North America, with the resulting data used to enhance air-quality forecasts.
As reported earlier, a Ukrainian An-124 Ruslan aircraft recently transported the JUICE interplanetary probe from Toulouse to the Kourou cosmodrome in French Guiana.
