SpaceX to Try Rocket Landing Again with DSCOVR Satellite LaunchSPACE.com
By Tariq Malik 1 hour ago
When SpaceX launches a long-delayed satellite to study space weather on Sunday, the private spaceflight company also hopes to do the amazing: return a rocket to Earth and land it on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX will attempt to land the first stage of its 14-story Falcon 9 rocket after launching the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR for short) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida. Liftoff is set for Sunday, Feb. 8, at 6:10 p.m. EST (2310 GMT) and
will be webcast live by NASA TV.
It will be SpaceX's second try in two months to land a rocket on an ocean drone ship as part of company founder Elon Musk's dream of making reusable rocket technology a reality. On Jan. 10, SpaceX attempted a Falcon 9 rocket landing but the booster ran out of hydraulic fluid for its four grid steering fins on the way down. The rocket stage slammed into SpaceX's drone ship and exploded.
"Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard," Musk wrote on Twitter after last month's attempt. "Close, but no cigar this time."
Now, SpaceX is ready to try it again. This time, SpaceX has loaded 50 percent more hydraulic fluid on the Falcon 9 booster, so there should be plenty of margin during the rocket's descent back to Earth.
"At least it should explode for a different reason," Musk wrote last month.
Musk and SpaceX have been pursuing reusable rockets because the technology has the potential to dramatically lower the costs for both satellite launches and human spaceflight. The company is also building a new giant rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, and unveiled a video showing the mega-rocket's reusability last month.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets are named after the fictional Millennium Falcon starship from "Star Wars." Continuing that theme, Musk has named SpaceX's drone ship "Just Read the Instructions" after the sentient colony ship from the science fiction novels by author Iain M. Banks. The drone ship will be positioned several hundred miles off the coast of Florida to await the Falcon 9 booster during Sunday's launch.
Sunday's launch is also a second change of sorts for the DSCOVR space weather satellite. Succesfully launching the satellite is SpaceX's primary goal on Sunday. The rocket landing test is a secondary objective.
The $104.8 million DSCOVR satellite has had a long road to space that began during the Clinton Administration when then-Vice President Al Gore advocated the mission to provide live images of Earth from space 24 hours a day. The mission, initially called Triana, was approved in 1998, but eventually shelved as costs rose.
NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revived the DSCOVR mission in 2009, this time to monitor space weather and solar wind while also studying the Earth. The satellite will be sent to the sun-Earth Lagrange point 1, a location about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) that is directly between Earth and the sun.
"DSCOVR will succeed NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer's (ACE) role in supporting solar wind alerts and warnings from the L1 orbit, the neutral gravity point between the Earth and sun approximately one million miles from Earth," NOAA officials wrote in a mission description. "L1 is a good position from which to monitor the sun, because the constant stream of particles from the sun (the solar wind) reaches L1 about an hour before reaching Earth."
DSCOVR carries five separate instruments, three of which will track solar wind and space weather events. The other two will monitor the Earth. One of those is the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, or EPIC, which will take images of the sunlit side of Earth every 2 hours for 24 hours a day. Those images will be available for scientists and to the public through NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
Editor's note:You can
watch NASA's prelaunch press conference on the DSCOVR/SpaceX launch today at 1 p.m. EST (1800 GMT) live on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.
http://news.yahoo.com/spacex-try-rocket-landing-again-dscovr-satellite-launch-145829622.html
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