STP-3

Atlas V's Centaur upper stage made three burns to carry two Northrop Grumman spacecraft to geosynchronous orbit, a flight of 7 hours 10 minutes to final separation that was ULA's longest to that point. STPSat-6, the primary, hosts nine payloads, among them a nuclear detonation detection sensor and NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration, an optical data-link test. The rideshare LDPE-1 released the Ascent cubesat on 25 January 2022.