A Brazilian
suborbital rocket successfully launched a European microgravity experiment
Thursday in a debut flight staged from northern Sweden.
A Texus-EML
sounding rocket equipped with Brazil's VSB-30 engine launched from Sweden's
Esrange facility near Kiruna at 4:06 a.m. EST (0906 GMT) on a mission to
provide a few minutes of microgravity for a joint experiment developed by the
European and German space agencies, European Space Agency (ESA) officials said.
The space
shot gave scientists about six minutes and 37 seconds of weightlessness to test
the properties of molten metals for the ESA's IMPRESS science program.
"This
launch is a major step forward in zero-g experimentation for the IMPRESS
project," said ESA project manager David Jarvis in a statement.
The
findings will help the development of new metals for gas turbines, hydrogen
fuel cells and jet engines for aircraft, researchers added. IMPRESS is short
for Intermetallic Materials Processing in Relation to Earth and Space
Solidification.
The launch
also marked step forward for the Brazilian Space Agency (Agencia Espacial
Brasileiria), which hopes to launch its first astronaut - Marcos
Pontes - to the International Space Station (ISS) in March 2006 aboard a
Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft.
During the
brief flight, the two-stage Texus rocket carried a new Electromagnetic
Levitator (EML) facility to an altitude of more than 161 miles (260 kilometers), then
returned it to Earth via parachute.
Esrange
officials said the rocket performed flawlessly, but flew higher and landed
further west than normal - about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) inside Norway in an
uninhabited mountain region. One possible cause of the flight deviation may have been the need
to aim the rocket more westward to avoid reindeer herders in the eastern
section of the nominal landing zone, they added.
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