Blue Origin Prepares for NS-13 Flight with ARMAS Payload
VAN HORN, TEXAS – Blue Origin announced today that it is targeting liftoff for the New Shepard (NS-13) launch out of the West Texas Launch Site (WTLS). The launch, originally scheduled for Sep 23, is short-term delayed . This will be the 13th New Shepard mission and the 7th consecutive flight for this particular vehicle (a record), demonstrating its operational reusability.
As part of the New Shepard payload complement, Space Environment Technologies (SET) will be flying two ARMAS FM7 radiation detectors to transmit, in real-time, the dose during the flight. SET’s ARMAS FM7 instrument accurately measures the radiation environment deriving from Galactic Cosmic Rays, solar energetic particles, and Van Allen radiation belts. This flight marks an important technological milestone using an automated Bluetooth-enabled data feed from the ARMAS FM7 instrument to an iPhone iOS app onboard the capsule. This is an important milestone for modernizing International Space Station and Lunar Gateway radiation automated data communications. An overall ARMAS goal is the improvement of air and space traffic management by monitoring global radiation “weather” and allowing commercial air and space traffic to avoid higher radiation areas. The ARMAS iOS app in the Apple app store, available in October 2020, provides much of this information to individual users.
SET’s ARMAS Suborbital Payload with FM7s and iPhone 11
