Posted on 03/04/2011 5:23:14 AM PST by Skeez
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) -- A rocket that blasted off early Friday carrying an Earth-observation satellite has failed to reach orbit, NASA said.
The Taurus XL rocket carrying NASA's Glory satellite lifted off about 2:10 a.m. PST from Vandenberg Air Force Base, officials said .
But NASA said in a brief statement that a protective shell or fairing atop the rocket did not separate from the satellite as it should have about three minutes after the launch.
That left the Glory spacecraft without the velocity to reach orbit, NASA launch commentator George Diller said.
"The flight was going well until the time of fairing separation," Diller said. "We did not have a successful fairing separation from the Taurus and there was insufficient velocity with the fairing still on for the vehicle to achieve orbit."
The status of the flight wasn't immediately clear and flight officials didn't immediately respond to calls for further comment.
Glory was launched on a three-year mission to analyze how airborne particles affect Earth's climate. Besides monitoring particles in the atmosphere, it will also track solar radiation to determine the sun's effect on climate change.
The $424 million mission is managed by the NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Friday's launch came after engineers spent more than a week troubleshooting a glitch that led to a last-minute scrub.
Glory was supposed to study tiny atmospheric particles known as aerosols, which reflect and trap sunlight. The vast majority occurs naturally, spewed into the atmosphere by volcanoes, forest fires and desert storms. Aerosols can also come from manmade sources such as the burning of fossil fuel.
NASA suffered a mishap two years ago when a global warming satellite also destined to join the Earth-observation network crashed into the ocean near Antarctica...
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Must be due to global warming on take off!!
What is aTaurus?
No great loss.
What a boondoggle NASA is!
ML/NJ
Hey NASA, the sun makes things hot. Bonus tip, moisture makes things muggy when the sun is making things hot.
It was wasted anyway:
"Glory was launched on a three-year mission to analyze how airborne particles affect Earth's climate. ... sun's effect on climate change."
This way is just more obvious.
Already posted here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2683489/posts
Hmmm, sounds like we are devolving into the Soviet Union style success eh? Thanks Obama!
They’ll use this to their lying, tyrannical advantage.
“It’s far, FAR worse than even WE thought it was,” they’ll say. “Man’s activity has not caused only global warming, it has caused UNIVERSAL warming!”
That Muslim outreach isn’t as explosive as they thought.
grin
A car made by Ford, not Government Motors.............
Capitalism causes the sun’s output to increase.
And, if we don't do Something NOW!, then I diddily-diddy-guaranteeidilly it will cause LUDICROUS WARMING.
There’s another angle to think about here. I’m a little disappointed this thing crashed, because if it was meant to legitimately study the effect of the sun on our climate, it could have objectively flattened the anthropogenic global warming arguments. Now, it’s business-as-usual. I bet there are some GW scientists just a little bit relieved...
Is there a model with bag racks and a/c?
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