PAYLOADS AND MISSIONS
10 kg
MAX PAYLOAD WEIGHT (22 LBS)
100 km
MAX ALTITUDE
M 3.7
TOP
SPEED
ach
PAYLOAD
Fly campaigns.
Not one-off missions.
Aurora is a rapid-turnaround platform for suborbital payloads, supports missions across:
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Atmospheric science
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Microgravity research and manufacturing
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Space technology development and qualification
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Defense and domain awareness applications
Our flight operations team works alongside you from mission design through to flight operations.
With customer missions already completed and expanding performance across flight profiles, you can now book to fly from Christchurch, NZ and Oklahoma, USA.
Aurora with Scout Space optical lens payload onboard
RESEARCH
Suborbital
Microgravity
When flying the Suborbital profile, Aurora can provide up to two minutes of altered gravity environments. These environments include microgravity, lunar gravity and martian gravity, achieved by varying Aurora's rotation rate. Alternatively, Aurora may be oriented and held at a fixed attitude for directing optical payloads.
The microgravity times are derived using a microgravity threshold of 10-4 g, (10-3 ms-2). Increasing the microgravity threshold to 10-3 G (10-2 ms-2) gives an additional 40 seconds of microgravity time. Additionally, reducing the payload weight results in the increases in microgravity time seen here.
CUSTOMERS AND PARTNERS
MISSION PROFILES
Boost
Glide
The Boost-Glide Profile is optimised to reach high Mach numbers within the atmosphere for supersonic and target presentation use-cases. With this profile, the Aurora can reach speeds up to Mach 3.7 and perform a range of maneuvers in the supersonic regime. The key phases of flight are shown above.
Aurora with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory data acquisition payload.
