Last Saturday , SpaceXreturned to flyingrockets in brilliant fashion with a arrant launch of its Falcon 9 rocket , carry 10 satellites for the Iridium communication theory company .
But it was n’t just the launch that was perfect . SpaceX peg its 7th successful landing , too , with the rocket touching down on the laggard shipJust record The Instructionswith one of the most accurate landing yet . It hit dead sum of the target on the ship .
In a series of new images posted onFlickr , SpaceX revealed some sensational new views of the landing in all its glory . The images show the rocket igniting its engine to softly touch down , before some glamor shots of it on the flatboat . One of the figure ( above ) even shew a sort of halo of light source around the rocket , as the rocket engine ’s body itself freeze out the Sun in a pretty awe-inspiring chance alignment .
The Vergegave a number more entropy on the photo , pronounce it probably was n’t just luck – but some preparation , too . “ A glimpse at the photograph ’s EXIF data reach us a piece more selective information on how the moment was captured : the exposure was buck by a Canon 6D with the shutter locked to 1/2500th of a second and the ISO set to ‘ car , ’ so this was likely one of a sequence of ( probably a few dozen ) images that was triggered mechanically , ” Sean O’Kane pen . He notice this was a pretty vulgar way to remotely range of a function rockets .
Saturday ’s launch took place at 12.54pm EST ( 5.54pm GMT ) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California , with the first stage of the rocket returning to the ground several hour later . It was SpaceX ’s first launching since August 14 , 2016 , and its first attempt at launching since one of its rocket blew up in a routine test on September 1 .
Now that SpaceX is up and race again , we ’ve got a bit of exciting milepost to look onward to , including the first launching of the Falcon Heavy roquette this yr and an unmanned test flight of stairs of its work party capsule in November .
Before then , though , rent ’s just enjoy some of these arresting photos , shall we ?
All images courtesy of SpaceX
