WASHINGTON
- NASA has delayed the launch of its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) aboard
a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from late this year until the end of
February at the earliest to make way for a military payload slated to fly atop
a similar vehicle.
"Because
of high demand for Atlas 5 launches for the next 12 months, NASA has agreed to
a request to exchange launch dates with another mission, allowing that mission
to launch earlier," NASA spokeswoman Nancy Jones told Space News.
"The new
LRO launch window now opens on the 27th of February 2009, and continues
through the end of March."
Jones
did not say who had asked to swap launch dates with LRO. Another NASA official
said the request was made by the U.S. Defense Department, which wants to have
its payload on orbit before the end of this year.
The
Florida newspaper Florida Today reported that the military payload would
be a space plane
prototype built for the Pentagon.
The
LRO had been on
schedule for a late 2008 liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The mission
development team at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will
use the additional time for more risk-reduction testing and to address any
problems the spacecraft might encounter during environmental testing currently
under way, Jones said.
NASA
officials have been warning for months that a combination of zero schedule
slack and a busy end of the year at Cape Canaveral could push the LRO's launch
into 2009.
Florida
Today contributed to this report.
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