Rocket Lab's 17th mission is a dedicated launch for Japanese Earth-imaging company Synspective.

Target Launch Time:
UTC | 10:09  NZT | 23:09 PT | 02:09 ET | 05:09 JST | 19:09

The mission is named ‘The Owl’s Night Begins’ in a nod to Synspective’s StriX family of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) spacecraft developed to be able to image millimetre-level changes to the Earth’s surface from space, independent of weather conditions on Earth and at any time of the day or night. Strix is also the genus of owls.

Electron is vertical on the pad at LC-1 for today's mission.

Webcast will be live around 20 mins before our target lift-off at 10:09 UTC 🚀🛰️

📺https://t.co/CQ8wAt6wnn pic.twitter.com/2yf9V8wcZy

— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) December 15, 2020

The StriX-α satellite onboard this mission will be the first of a series of spacecraft deployments for Synspective’s planned constellation of more than 30 SAR small satellites to collate data of metropolitan centers across Asia on a daily basis that can be used for urban development planning, construction and infrastructure monitoring, and disaster response.