CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Launch of a NASA solar probe from Cape Canaveral is being indefinitely delayed until investigators of the June 2 failure of a Pegasus shot in California can release their preliminary findings, the space agency announced Tuesday.
While no new launch date has been set for NASA's High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (HESSI) mission, this latest delay is expected to stretch at least a month.
The $85 million solar science mission was tentatively scheduled to fly on an Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket early Friday morning, but NASA officials want to wait until engineers determine what caused a similar Pegasus launcher to fail this month in a flight test of the agency's X-43A hypersonic aircraft.
Although early evidence from the X-43A mishap appeared to have cleared this Pegasus for launch, program managers decided to take a "precautionary stand down" and see what the still-ongoing investigation determines, NASA spokesman George Diller said Tuesday.
"As the engineering review board proceeded, they did not come up with anything that really indicted this vehicle, but we didn't know what else they might find. The feeling was maybe we didn't have all the information we really needed to have to make the decision to launch this week," Diller said.
As a result, the spacecraft and launch vehicle will be returned to Orbital Sciences' Pegasus home base at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The company's L-1011 mothership, known as Stargazer, will begin the cross-country flight at 10 a.m. EDT Thursday.Back in California the spacecraft will be serviced and the rocket's flight termination system batteries will be replaced. Other work may be performed there if the accident investigation board finds something that needs to be done, Diller said.
Once cleared for launch and dropped from Stargazer over the Atlantic Ocean, the HESSI spacecraft will be sent into a circular orbit some 373 miles (597 kilometers) above Earth.
Equipped with an imaging spectrometer, the spacecraft is designed to study solar flares, which can disrupt satellite and radio communications on Earth while triggering terrestrial power outages.
The spectrometer is expected to produce the first high-fidelity color movies of solar flares, zeroing in on high-energy X-rays and gamma rays emitted during the gigantic explosions.
Total cost of the mission -- including the launch vehicle, spacecraft and three years of mission operations -- will be $85 million.
It is unclear how much more the mission will cost as a result of this new delay, Diller said.
HESSI originally was slated for launch last July but the mission was postponed after the spacecraft was damaged during a March 2000 vibration test at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
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