March 25, 2022
Seven years after it last placed a working satellite in orbit—and following at least 11 botched launches—the Islamic Republic has now placed a working satellite in orbit around the Earth.
The success came less than two weeks after the regime’s latest botched launch, in which the rocket appears to have blown up on the launch pad.
The successful launch March 8 was conducted by the Pasdaran, not by Iran’s civilian space agency. The military said it used its own Qased rocket and placed the Nour-2 satellite in low earth orbit eight minutes after launch.
The Pasdaran also used the Qased rocket to put the Nour-1 satellite into orbit April 22, 2020. US officials, however, said that satellite was tumbling and thus unable to take pictures of the planet, making it little more than space junk. The regime has not told the Iranian public about that.
US officials confirmed that Nour-2 was in orbit. The satellite website n2yo said Nour-2 had an apogee (high point) of 519.8 kilometers and a perigee (low point) of 502.5 kilometers—a nearly round orbit, which means it should stay aloft for a long time. Iran’s civilian space agency successfully put four satellites in orbit in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2015. But all of them had low perigees and soon fell out of orbit and burned up. The four satellites remained aloft, in order of orbiting, 80 days, 21 days, 60 days and 24 days.
Nour-1, however, is still in orbit after almost two years—and in an even more circular orbit than Nour-2—indicating the Pasdaran have mastered the technology to get satellites in successful orbits. The military said it expected the Nour-1 satellite to remain in orbit another 7 to 10 months or 2-1/2 years altogether.
Brig. Gen. Ali Jafarabadi, the Pasdar space chief, said the Nour-2 was stable and not tumbling.
Jafarabadi said Nour-2 could take high quality images of the Earth—but he did not identify the specific resolution of the photos it could take. The civilian space agency has sometimes given the resolutions of the cameras on its previous satellites. They have all provided less detail than is available from commercially available satellite imagery. Jafarabadi did not give the weight of the Nour-2. All of Iran’s previous satellites to reach orbit have been termed microsatellites.
Iran has said the Qased rocket has a first stage using liquid fuel and a second and third stage using solid fuel.
Photos released by the Pasdaran showed the Qased was not fired from a launch pad, as is the norm for satellite launchers, but from a truck, which is commonly used for military rockets. This is likely to prompt more criticism that Iran is using its satellite program to obscure its work on military rockets. Any rocket that can put a satellite in orbit has at least the theoretical capability to carry a warhead to the other side of the planet. Iran claims that its longest military rocket has a range of 2,000 kilometers (1,200 mile),which means it is not a threat to Western Europe or North America.
Less than two weeks before the Nour-2 was successfully orbited, Iran’s civilian space agency appears to have tried to loft another satellite.
Iran said nothing about the launch, but an American satellite firm took photos of the space agency’s launch site in Semnan province that showed what appeared to be a failed launch effort.
Satellite images taken February 27 by Maxar Technologies showed scorch marks at a launch pad at the Imam Khomeini Spaceport. A rocket stand on the pad appears scorched and damaged, with vehicles surrounding it. An object, possibly part of the gantry, sits near it.
Successful launches typically don’t damage rocket gantries because they are removed prior to takeoff, suggesting the rocket had an accident before it was ignited for launch.
Separate images from Planet Labs showed no damage to the pad as of February 25, suggesting the failed launch occurred February 25, 26 or 27.
The rocket involved may have been Iran’s new Zuljanah satellite launch vehicle, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.
Lewis said the damaged gantry resembled one previously used in a successful test launch (meaning no satellite was on board) last year of a Zuljanah, named after a horse ridden by Imam Hussein.
It remains unclear what could have caused the damage. The first two stages of a Zuljanah are solid fueled, but its final stage is liquid and would have needed to be fueled on the launch pad, Lewis said.
“This just looks like it got interrupted, like something exploded,” Lewis told The Associated Press.
The space program has seen recent troubles. There have been six failures in a row of the Simorgh satellite launching rocket. In addition, a fire at the Imam Khomeini Spaceport in February 2019 killed three researchers, authorities acknowledged at the time.
The launch pad used in the latest launch remains scarred from an explosion in August 2019 that even drew the attention of then-President Donald Trump. He later tweeted what appeared to be a classified surveillance image of the launch failure.