Watch Rocket Lab launch private Japanese Earth-observing satellite early May 17

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a white and black rocket launches into a blue sky

A Rocket Lab Electron launcher carrying 13 NASA satellites, including 10 cubesats for agency's Educational Launch of Nanosatellites program, lifts off from New Zealand on Dec. 16, 2018. (Image credit: Rocket Lab)

Rocket Lab will launch an Earth-observing satellite for the Japanese company iQPS early Saturday morning (May 17), and you can watch the action live.

An Electron rocket is scheduled to lift off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site on Saturday during an hour-long window that opens at 4:15 a.m. EDT (0815 GMT; 8:15 p.m. local New Zealand time).

Rocket Lab will webcast the launch live, beginning the stream 30 minutes before liftoff. You can watch it here at Space.com if, as expected, the company makes the stream available.

Rocket Lab calls the upcoming mission "The Sea God Sees." That's a reference to the satellite going up, which iQPS has nicknamed Wadatsumi-I after a water deity in Japanese mythology.

Wadatsumi-I is a synthetic aperature radar (SAR) satellite, so it will be able to image Earth at all times of day and through cloud cover. If all goes to plan on "The Sea God Sees," the Electron will deploy the spacecraft into a 357-mile-high (575-kilometer-high) circular orbit 50.5 minutes after liftoff. The craft will then join iQPS' growing SAR constellation.

"To date, nine QPS-SAR satellites have been launched, and iQPS aims to establish a constellation of 36 satellites," Rocket Lab wrote in the mission's press kit, which you can find here.

"This will enable the delivery of a 'NearReal-Time Data Provisioning Service,' allowing for the observation of specific regions worldwide at an average interval of 10 minutes," the company added. "This will make it possible to collect continuous images as data, and to accumulate data not only on 'Stationary Objects' such as land and buildings, but also on 'Moving Objects' such as vehicles, ships, and cattle and livestock."

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circular space mission patch showing a rocket flying over waves, with the words "rocket lab," "the sea god sees" and "iqps" around the outside

"The Sea God Sees" will be the sixth mission of 2025 and 64th overall flight for the 59-foot-tall (18-meter-tall) Electron.

It will be the third Electron launch for iQPS and the second of eight planned missions across 2025 and 2026 to build out the company's Earth-observing network, according to Rocket Lab.

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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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