Falcon 9 • Twilight

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched on a rideshare mission called Twilight. Among the payloads onboard was NASA’s Pandora small satellite, which is designed to characterize the atmospheres of exoplanets and their host stars. The company Exolaunch is responsible for deploying 22 satellites during the mission, including Dcubed-1/Araqys-D1, which will demonstrate on-orbit, 3D printing of a boom. The payloads were deployed into a dusk-dawn Sun-synchronous orbit. About 7.5 minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 first stage booster, tail number 1097, launching for a fifth time, landed back at Landing Zone 4.