The Federal Aviation Administration said on July 22, local time, that a regional power outage occurred in the Santa Barbara area of California that day, causing a communication interruption at the Los Angeles Air Traffic Control Center and forcing the Space Exploration Technology Company to postpone the Falcon 9 rocket launch mission originally scheduled for that day.
It is said that this regional power outage has affected the center's aviation control ability over the Pacific airspace, and the postponement of the "Falcon 9" launch is to ensure the safety of air travel.
NASA and SpaceX originally planned to launch a "Falcon 9" rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California that day, carrying the "TRACERS" satellite (Magnetic Reconnection Detection Binary Star in the Polar Region) and three other small satellites. It is now planned to launch again no earlier than 11:13 am local time on July 23 (2:13 am Beijing time on July 24).
According to reports, the "TRACERS" satellite launch mission will launch a pair of binary satellites to focus on studying the Earth's magnetosphere - the natural magnetic barrier that protects the Earth from the impact of the sun's supersonic particle flow, also known as the "solar wind". The double star uses a sun-synchronous orbit to achieve polar flight. By measuring how the magnetic explosion phenomenon accelerates solar wind particles into the earth's atmosphere, it reveals how these cosmic energy bursts affect space weather, which in turn affects on-orbit satellites, aerospace technology and astronaut safety.