On June 26, a fairly normal Black Brant IX sounding rocket launched, carrying a payload studying X-ray sources to learn how galaxies and the stars in them evolved. Those targets, and indeed the launch site for the sounding rocket, were anything but normal, Australia. Launching from the southern hemisphere gives scientists access to parts of the sky they cannot reach from the usual launch sites in the United States.

Another milestone of this mission, the first of three which will go from the launch pad, is that it is run by a commercial company, Equatorial Launch Australia. NASA has previously launched sounding rockets from Australia, but those were done from the Australian Air Force’s Woomera Range Complex. Plans for the ELA site started in 2015 to bring economic investment to the area. The pad is quite hard to get to, over a day’s drive from Darwin, the largest city in the Northern Territory. The rocket stages had to be brought over water by barge.

The X-ray Quantum Calorimeter payload studied Alpha Centauri A and B, two of the closest stars to the Sun. In particle physics, a calorimeter measures the energy of particles. Just as this isn’t NASA’s first sounding rocket from Australia, this isn’t XQC’s first time in space. It flew into space 6 times from 1995 to 2013. It will tell a team from the University of Wisconsin the origin of a particularly bright patch of X-ray light. This patch is not visible from the northern hemisphere. The X-rays come from either type Ia or type II supernovae. Being able to distinguish the X-rays from these two sources will tell scientists about how the galaxy evolved because type II supernovae come from much younger stars than Ia.

The second of three sounding rockets from Australia this summer will also study Alpha Centauri A and B but in ultraviolet light, not X-ray. The third mission also studies ultraviolet light, but in a new band that hasn’t been studied too much.

More Information

NASA press release

NASA Conducting Suborbital Rocket Missions in Australia in June and July 2022 (NASA)