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 Launch had been targeted for 6:10 p.m. EST from Cape Canaveral Air
Force Station in Florida. But about 2.5 minutes before liftoff, a
problem cropped up with an Air Force radar system needed to track
the rocket in flight.
The next opportunity to launch is 6:07 p.m. EST on Monday, said NASA
launch commentator Michael Curie.
The rocket carries the Deep Space Climate Observatory, nicknamed
DSCOVR, a partnership of NASA and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
DSCOVR is expected to replace a 17-year-old satellite monitoring for
potentially dangerous solar storms. Tsunamis of charged particles
from the sun, called coronal mass ejections, can disrupt GPS and
other satellite signals, block radio communications and impact
electric power grids on Earth, NOAA said.
“We think of DSCOVR as a weather buoy,” NOAA administrator and
former astronaut Kathryn Sullivan said during a NASA launch webcast.
“It senses first the blasts of solar wind and embedded magnetic
fields that are potentially going to wreak some havoc.”
Following launch, DSCOVR will take more than three months to reach
its operational orbit around the sun, almost 1 million miles (1.6
million) km inward from Earth.
The satellite’s original mission, championed by then-Vice President
Al Gore, was to provide a near-continuous view of Earth that would
be distributed via the Internet in an attempt to raise environmental
awareness, much like the iconic Apollo 17"Blue Marble" picture of
Earth did in the early 1970s.
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The satellite, then called Triana - and lampooned as "GoreSat" - was
due to launch on the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia mission in
2003, but it was pulled from the manifest and put into storage after
President George H.W. Bush moved into the White House.
A decade later, Triana was refurbished and reborn as the DSCOVR
solar observatory. In addition to instruments to study the solar
wind, it has two sensors for Earth science observations, such as
tracking volcanic plumes, measuring ozone and monitoring droughts,
flooding and fires.
The satellite also will take pictures of Earth every two hours that
will be posted on the Internet the next day, fulfilling in part
Gore's dream.
“The opportunity for every man, woman and child who lives on the
Earth to see … their own home in the context of the whole can add to
our way of thinking about our relationship to the Earth,” Gore, who
was at the Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch, told reporters.
(Editing by Andrew Hay)
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