Thu, Feb 24, 2011
Special Instruments Designed To Monitor Aerosols In The
Atmosphere
Two cloud cameras built by Ball
Aerospace & Technologies Corp. will fly aboard NASA's Glory
climate-monitoring mission scheduled to launch this week from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. During the final 15
minutes before Wednesday's scheduled launch of 0509 EST, the
vehicle interface control console, a ground interface with Orbital
Sciences' Taurus XL rocket, gave an unexpected reading. The cause
and potential effect of the reading was not fully understood. With
a 48-second available launch window, there was insufficient time to
analyze the issue causing the launch to be postponed. Members of
the Taurus team are troubleshooting the issue.
The launch of NASA's Glory spacecraft from Vandenberg Air Force
Base in California is currently planned for no earlier than Friday,
Feb. 25, at 0509 EST. Engineers from NASA and Orbital Sciences
Corp. continue to troubleshoot a technical issue that arose during
Wednesday's initial launch attempt.
Ball Aerospace designed and built the semi-custom Glory cloud
cameras for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center using standard
CT-633 star tracker electronics and custom optics and software. The
cloud cameras are mounted separately but will operate in
conjunction with the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor, which provides
data on the properties of black carbon and other types of aerosols
as well as clouds in the Earth's atmosphere.
The Glory cameras extend technologies first developed by Ball
for the successful cloud camera flying onboard the Cloud-Aerosol
LIDAR and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO)
mission launched in 2006. Once on orbit, Glory will join CALIPSO as
part of NASA's A-train satellite formation of Earth-observation
satellites.
The three-year Glory mission will contribute to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Program by studying the
causes and consequences of global environmental changes as well as
helping to determine how to predict these changes.
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