Q&A with Keith Gendreau, principal investigator of the first X-ray space communications experiment (members only)

Rocket Lab teams in New Zealand are preparing for the company’s first launch of the year Sunday (U.S. time) with a small experimental satellite for DARPA, the U.S. military’s research and development agency.

In a complex bit of orbital surgery, two spacewalking astronauts cut into a $2 billion cosmic ray detector Friday, venting away life-sustaining carbon dioxide refrigerant and then snipping eight coolant lines the size of soda straws to prepare the high-tech “patient” for a coolant pump transplant.

The NROL-48 mission was the fifth mission this year supporting the National Reconnaissance Office’s expansive low Earth orbit statellite constellation it calls the proliferated architecture. Liftoff from pad 4E occurred at 10:38 a.m. PDT (1:38 p.m. EDT / 1738 UTC).