A NASA
spacecraft destined for the planet Pluto must wait one more day after high
winds prevented a Tuesday launch attempt from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air
Force Station.
NASA's will provide live coverage of New Horizons' launch beginning at 11 a.m. EST Jan. 18. Click here. |
Flight
controllers scrubbed the planned launch of NASA's New
Horizons Pluto probe and its Atlas 5 rocket just two minutes and 42 seconds
before the booster's engines were scheduled to fire. High ground winds, which
dogged flight controllers throughout the day, proved too strong to loft the
spacecraft safely, NASA officials said.
"We chose
not to launch today because the ground winds were just a bit too high," NASA
spokesperson Bruce Buckingham said after the scrub announcement. "The wind
limit at the pad is 33 knots [and] we have exceeded that limit several times
today."
NASA now plans
to launch New Horizons Wednesday at 1:16 p.m. EST (1816 GMT), Buckingham added.
High winds
prompted flight controllers to delay today's launch several times. The Lockheed
Martin-built Atlas 5 rocket was initially set to carry New Horizons spaceward at
1:24 p.m. EST (1824 GMT), but the ever-present winds pushed the space shot
deeper into its launch window.
In
television coverage provided by NASA TV, clouds whipped across the skies above
the New Horizons-Atlas 5 vehicle as wind blew across treetops surrounding the
launch pad.
Glitches
with an Atlas 5 vent valve, a ground tracking station in Antigua and NASA's
Deep Space Network also led to launch delays, though the wind concerns were
omnipresent throughout those issues.
"Space
science is almost the ultimate in the delayed gratification," NASA chief
Michael Griffin told reporters at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) before the
launch attempt.
For New
Horizons mission scientists and managers, 'delayed gratification' is an
understatement.
The $700
million mission is the first ever aimed at Pluto, its moon system and the icy Kuiper
Belt objects that sit in the outer solar system. The mission weathered several
budget
battles and funding
hunts during the long road to the launch pad.
About the
size of a grand piano, the 1,025-pound (465-kilogram) spacecraft carries seven
primary instruments powered by a radioisotope
thermoelectric generator (RTG), which converts heat from decaying plutonium
into electricity.
"We're
raring to go," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern,
of the Southwest Research Institute, said before the scrub.
Stern said
that today's launch attempt was significant for himself and the New Horizons mission
to Pluto. It marked the anniversary of the death of Clyde Tombaugh,
the astronomer who discovered
Pluto using Flagstaff, Arizona's Lowell Observatory in 1930.
"He died
nine years ago today, almost to the hour of our [planned] launch," Stern said.
Tombaugh's
widow Patsy and children, now grown, attended today's attempted space shot,
NASA officials said.
Despite
today's wind problems, flight controllers reported no problems with the New
Horizons spacecraft itself and are confident the probe will launch before its
window runs out.
"We have a
really good spacecraft," Stern told SPACE.com in an earlier interview. "A
really good spacecraft."
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