Fwd: NASA Eyes Glitch With LADEE Probe After Launch

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: September 7, 2013 12:03:32 PM GMT-06:00
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: NASA Eyes Glitch With LADEE Probe After Launch

 

 

NASA launches robotic explorer to moon from Va.

Associated Press

MARCIA DUNN 

 

NASA's newest robotic explorer rocketed into space late Friday in an unprecedented moonshot from Virginia that dazzled sky watchers along the East Coast.

 

But the LADEE spacecraft quickly ran into equipment trouble, and while NASA assured everyone early Saturday that the lunar probe was safe and on a perfect track for the moon, officials acknowledged the problem needs to be resolved in the next two to three weeks.

 

S. Peter Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California, which developed the spacecraft, told reporters he's confident everything will be working properly in the next few days.

 

LADEE's reaction wheels were turned on to orient and stabilize the spacecraft, which was spinning too fast after it separated from the final rocket stage, Worden said. But the computer automatically shut the wheels down, apparently because of excess current. He speculated the wheels may have been running a little fast.

 

Worden stressed there is no rush to "get these bugs ironed out."

 

The LADEE spacecraft, which is charged with studying the lunar atmosphere and dust, soared aboard an unmanned Minotaur rocket a little before midnight from Virginia's Eastern Shore.

 

"Godspeed on your journey to the moon, LADEE," Launch Control said. Flight controllers applauded and exchanged high-fives following the successful launch. "We are headed to the moon!" NASA said in a tweet.

 

It was a change of venue for NASA, which normally launches moon missions from Cape Canaveral, Fla. But it provided a rare light show along the East Coast for those blessed with clear skies.

 

NASA urged sky watchers to share their launch pictures through the website Flickr, and the photos and sighting reports quickly poured in from New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New Jersey, Rhode Island, eastern Pennsylvania and Virginia, among other places.

 

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer or LADEE, pronounced "LA'-dee," is taking a roundabout path to the moon, making three huge laps around Earth before getting close enough to pop into lunar orbit.

 

Unlike the quick three-day Apollo flights to the moon, LADEE will need a full month to reach Earth's closest neighbor. An Air Force Minotaur V rocket, built by Orbital Sciences Corp., provided the ride from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility.

 

LADEE, which is the size of a small car, is expected to reach the moon on Oct. 6.

 

Scientists want to learn the composition of the moon's ever-so-delicate atmosphere and how it might change over time. Another puzzle, dating back decades, is whether dust actually levitates from the lunar surface.

 

The $280 million moon-orbiting mission will last six months and end with a suicide plunge into the moon for LADEE.

 

The 844-pound spacecraft has three science instruments as well as laser communication test equipment that could revolutionize data relay. NASA hopes to eventually replace its traditional radio systems with laser communications, which would mean faster bandwidth using significantly less power and smaller devices.

 

"There's no question that as we send humans farther out into the solar system, certainly to Mars," that laser communications will be needed to send high-definition and 3-D video, said NASA's science mission chief, John Grunsfeld, a former astronaut who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

 

It was a momentous night for Wallops, which was making its first deep-space liftoff. All of its previous launches were confined to Earth orbit.

 

"It was just a beautiful evening," Grunsfeld said.

 

NASA chose Wallops for LADEE because of the Minotaur V rocket, comprised of converted intercontinental ballistic missile motors belonging to the Air Force. A U.S.-Russian treaty limits the number of launch sites because of the missile parts.

 

All but one of NASA's previous moon missions since 1959, including the manned Apollo flights of the late 1960s and early 1970s, originated from Cape Canaveral. The most recent were the twin Grail spacecraft launched almost exactly two years ago. The military-NASA Clementine rocketed away from Southern California in 1994.

 

Wallops will be back in the spotlight in less than two weeks. The Virginia-based Orbital Sciences will make its first delivery to the International Space Station, using its own Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule. That commercial launch is scheduled for Sept. 17.

 

___

 

Online:

 

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ladee/main/index.html

 

Orbital Sciences Corp.: http://tinyurl.com/n6jtpcm

 

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

 

 

NASA robotic spacecraft lifts off to probe lunar dust

By Irene Klotz

 

(Reuters) - An unmanned Minotaur 5 rocket blasted off from the Virginia coast on Friday to send a small NASA science satellite on its way to the moon, officials said.

 

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer spacecraft, known as LADEE, was designed to look for dust rising from the lunar surface, a phenomenon reported by the Apollo astronauts decades ago.

 

"For the first time in 40 years, we have the opportunity to address that mystery," project scientist Richard Elphic, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said during a launch broadcast on NASA TV.

 

From an orbit as low as about 31 miles above the lunar surface, LADEE also will probe the thin pocket of gases surrounding the moon. The tenuous atmosphere, which contains argon, helium, sodium, potassium and other elements, may hold clues about how water came to be trapped inside craters on the moon's frozen poles.

 

"We're taught in grade school and probably junior high that the moon has no atmosphere," Elphic said.

 

"Indeed it does have an atmosphere, but it's utterly unlike our own atmosphere. It's very tenuous," he said.

 

LADEE's 30-day trip to the moon began with an 11:27 p.m. EDT/0327 GMT Saturday liftoff of a five-stage Minotaur rocket making its debut flight. The first three stages are decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missile motors, and the last two stages are commercial motors manufactured by Alliant Techsystems Inc.

 

The rocket blasted off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility, the first deep-space mission to fly from the Virginia spaceport.

 

Weather permitting, the rocket was expected to be visible from Maine to eastern North Carolina, and as far west as Wheeling, West Virginia. New Yorkers were due to be treated to a live televised view of the launch on the Toshiba Vision Screen in Times Square, just below the site where the famous New Year's Eve ball is dropped.

 

The use of decommissioned missile components drove the decision to fly from Wallops Island, one of only a few launch sites permitted to fly refurbished ICBMs under U.S.-Russian arms control agreements.

 

LADEE's month-long journey to the moon includes three highly elliptical passes around Earth, timed so that during the final orbit the probe will be far enough away to be captured by the moon's gravity after LADEE fires its braking rocket.

 

Once LADEE is in lunar orbit, scientists will check out the spacecraft's three instruments and test a prototype optical laser communications system. Science operations are expected to begin in November.

 

"This is a science mission, but it has some new technology," Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, told Reuters. "We're confident stuff will work, but we certainly will be watching very, very carefully as each of these new things unfolds."

 

The $280 million mission is expected to last about six months.

 

(Reporting by Irene Klotz in Portland, Maine; Editing by Jackie Frank and Eric Walsh)

 

Copyright Thomson Reuters 2013. All rights reserved. 

 

 

NASA Eyes Glitch With New Moon Probe After Dazzling Launch

by Miriam Kramer, SPACE.com Staff Writer   |   September 07, 2013 02:59am ET

 

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. — After a near-perfect launch late Friday (Sept. 6), NASA's newest moon probe has encountered its first glitch on the road to Earth's nearest neighbor.

 

NASA's robotic Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) blasted off atop a Minotaur V rocket from here at the space agency's Wallops Flight Facility in a dazzling Friday night launch that was visible from wide stretches of the U.S. East Coast.

 

Although the launch was nearly flawless, LADEE ran into some trouble right after its separation from the Minotaur V. The probe's onboard computer shut down LADEE's reaction wheels, which are used to stabilize the attitude of the probe in space, after noticing that they were drawing too much current. [See spectacular launch photos of NASA's LADEE moon probe]

 

But there's no reason to panic, NASA officials said.

 

"This is not an unusual event in spacecraft," Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., which is leading the LADEE mission, said during a press conference in the wee hours of Saturday morning (Sept. 7). LADEE was developed and built at the Ames center.

 

"I've been involved with a lot of missions, particularly missions with small spacecraft," Worden said. "[They] quite often have things that don't come on the way you want. The really important thing is that we have full communications. Everything is healthy onboard the spacecraft. Everything is working, and the computer did what it was supposed to do."

 

Engineers will work to develop a repair plan over the next few days. But there's not a great deal of time pressure at the moment, Worden said. LADEE will take nearly a month to get to the moon on its long and looping route.

 

Further, the probe has a backup if there is something seriously wrong with the reaction wheels.

 

"The nice thing about this is that we have two ways to orient [LADEE]," Worden added. "One is with thrusters, the other is with reaction wheels. So we're pretty confident that we're going to get it in the right state."

 

The Minotaur V rocket took off on time at 11:27 p.m. EDT (0327 Sept. 7 GMT), lighting up the night spectacularly as a crowd of onlookers watched in amazement. From the ground at Wallops, observers could see the stages of the rocket separate and ignite in the perfectly clear night sky. Skywatchers reported seeing the rocket streak through the sky from Massachusetts, New York City, Washington, D.C., North Carolina and many other East Coast locales.

 

All but one of NASA's moon launches have taken off from pads in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The space agency's Clementine spacecraft launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1994.

 

After its smooth launch, the $280 million LADEE spacecraft is now beginning its 30-day journey to the moon. The loveseat-sized lunar probe is carrying instrumentation that scientists hope will help them solve some big moon mysteries.

 

The probe is built to measure the extremely thin lunar atmosphere (called a surface boundary exosphere) from its prescribed low orbit. LADEE's exploration of the atmosphere could help scientists better characterize the wispy atmospheres of other bodies in the solar system.

 

Surface boundary exospheres are actually the most common type of atmosphere in the solar system, mission team members have said.

 

LADEE could also help researchers solve a mystery dating back to before the Apollo era. A robotic NASA lander first caught sight of a strange glow on the moon's horizon before sunrise. Apollo astronauts also observed the luminosity, and LADEE is expected to help NASA scientists uncover the reason for it.

 

The spacecraft will examine dust particles lofted high into the lunar atmosphere, the leading explanation for the glow.

 

LADEE is also carrying a new laser communications technology demonstration that could help lay for the foundation for a high-speed "interplanetary Internet." The spacecraft will beam information back to ground controllers here on Earth using lasers, as opposed to the usual radio waves, during a 30-day checkout period when LADEE arrives at the moon.

 

TechMediaNetwork Copyright © 2013 All Rights Reserved.