A NASA mission
to launch three small satellites on a technology-testing spaceflight Tuesday is
facing a stormy start, launch officials said Sunday.
The Space
Technology 5 mission, which is expected to shake down microsatellite technologies
for future missions to track space weather, has just a 20 percent chance of rocketing
spaceward from an air-based mothership due to poor weather conditions expected
for its March 14 launch target.
Poor
weather has already forced ground crews to shift their schedules during the
spacecraft's weekend launch preparations, said Chuck Dovale, NASA's ST5 launch
director, during a press conference at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. On Sunday, hail at the mission's Vandenberg staging ground delayed battery
charging for all three microsatellites, he added.
NASA's $130
million ST5 mission, part of the agency's New
Millennium Program to develop new technologies, is currently set to launch
three small microsatellites - each the size of a large cake (or 13-inch
television set) and weighing 55 pounds (25 kilograms) - into orbit atop an
Orbital Sciences' built Pegasus XL rocket.
An L-1011
Stargazer aircraft will haul the Pegasus booster to an altitude of about 39,000
feet (11,887 meters) before dropping the rocket into launch position at about 9:02
a.m. EST (1402 GMT). The space shot has a 77-minute launch window, Dovale said.
Technology
shakedown
Each of the
three ST5 spacecraft is expected to test six technologies that range from software
tools for autonomous ground operations to a new cold gas micro-thruster for
minute course corrections.
The
microsatellites also carry a flux magnetometer to measure the effects of solar
radiation and particles on the Earth's magnetic field, mission managers said.
Such
interactions between particles and radiation from the Sun - such as coronal
mass ejections or solar flares
- and the Earth's magnetic field can interfere with satellite operations,
communications
- including mobile phones and pagers - and other space-based systems that
society has grown dependent in the last few decades.
"ST5 is
going to measure the intensity...the stability and the motion of the electrical
currents moving in and out of our ionosphere," said James Slavin, the mission's
project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight in Greenbelt, Maryland. "We're going to demonstrate constellation level science operations, to take
multiple spacecraft and operate them as a single instrument."
The ST5
mission could lead to a future space weather monitoring system and better
techniques to safeguard satellites from the radiation environment, Slavin
added.
"We may actually
launch a space weather mission with a 100 small satellites in the future,"
Slavin said, adding that each of the swarm's microsatellites could be
positioned in a different location to allow better forecasts, monitoring and
possibly early-warning capabilities of solar events.
But first,
the ST5 must begin its 90-day mission.
U.S Air
Force Capt. David Bieger, the flight's launch weather officer for the 30th
Weather Squadron at Vandenberg, said that while forecasts of rain,
thunderstorms and thick clouds threatened ST5's planned Tuesday launch, there
was an 80 percent chance of favorable conditions for a March 15.
"It's much
more favorable on Wednesday," Bieger said of ST5's launch conditions.
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