cluster2_solar_mission_0808 PARIS -- Twenty-four days after the successful launch of the first two
European Cluster satellites Salsa and Samba on July 16, scientists and European Space Agency (ESA) officials are eagerly waiting for the launch of the second Cluster pair from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Rumba and Tango, the second set of European scientific satellites, are currently scheduled for launch at 7:13 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (11:13 GMT) on August 9. Following their release from the Soyuz-Fregat launch vehicle provided by the French-Russian Starsem consortium, the satellites will participate in an almost identical series of complex orbital maneuvers to their predecessors.
If all goes well, by August 15 they will join their companions to form a unique space quartet. This mini-armada will spend the next two years exploring the interaction between the charged particles swept along in the solar wind and Earths magnetic shield the
magnetosphere. A flotilla of satellites
After arriving in orbit later this summer, the Cluster-satellite flotilla will be operational only at the end of the year to work as a four-spacecraft constellation to study how particles ejected by the sun interact with Earth's magnetic field.
Earth orbiting into a solar-mass ejection.
The Cluster mission will investigate for the first time the invisible solar phenomena that affect and sometimes seriously disturb our planet, causing power blackouts, satellite disruptions and other problems. But don't expect to see any photos taken by Cluster 2 -- its main objective is fundamental physics.
The Cluster quartet will provide the most detailed data yet on the sun-Earth connection and the physical processes taking place between 11,780 and 73,780 miles (18,955 and 118,735 kilometers) above our heads.
The four ships will skim through a sea of particles in
Earth's polar orbit and they will direct the craft in pyramidal formations. ~
The stream of information returned by the 44 instruments (11 per satellite) will be distributed to eight national data centers: six in Europe, one in the U.S. and one in China.
An international scientific community
The Cluster 2 scientific community includes more than 200 scientists from the ESA with its 14 member states, the United States, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Israel, Japan and Russia.
One of the key scientific tools aboard is the U.S. Wide Band Data instrument (WBD) which was designed and built at The University of Iowa through funding provided by NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center. It's designed to provide high-resolution measurements of both electric and magnetic fields in selected frequency bands. Critical mission
Cluster 2 is one of the ESA's most critical science missions because it is a replacement for the original Cluster mission. The first four automatic spacecraft were destroyed in June 1996 when an Ariane 5 exploded 30 seconds after liftoff.
The Cluster quartet will provide the most detailed data yet on the sun-Earth connection and the physical processes taking place between 11,780 and 73,780 miles (18,955 and 118,735 kilometers) above our heads.
That was a costly loss of $508 million. The second identical set was built under tight financial constraints for $315 million.
"In the worst-case scenario, the two Clusters launched last month could fulfill their mission without the other two, but we couldn't obtain a tri-dimensional understanding of how particles ejected by the sun interact with Earth's magnetic field," Philippe Escoubet, project scientist for the European Space Agency's Cluster 2 told SPACE.com.
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