14 DAY TRIAL // Preliminary reports as to what went wrong with the NASA Glory satellite yesterday, March 4, indicate that the Taurus XL delivery system, which is built by Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC), still has a nose cone separation issue.
This is the second consecutive launch of such a rocket that fails. Each time, it carried a NASA climate science satellite. In 2009, a Taurus XL took off carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO).
At that time, the nose cone also failed to separate from the four-stage rocket, making the entire payload too heavy and too slow to reach its intended orbit. OCO subsequently crashed into the Indian Ocean.
The same thing happened during Glory's launch. Some 3 minutes into the flight, the protective fairing enveloping the satellite should have separated from the expendable rocket, but failed to do so.
As a result, the spacecraft could not achieve escape velocity, and failed to enter orbit. It stalled, and then crashed into the Pacific Ocean. It took off from the Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), in California, at 2:09 am PST (1009 GMT).
NASA has established a commission to investigate the exact causes of the failure. The satellite was worth more than $424 million dollars, and represented years of work by engineers and scientists.
Its main purpose was to analyze aerosols, tiny solid and liquid particles that remain suspended in our planet's atmosphere. They play in important role in dictating climate patterns, and can have several possible origins.
Experts were interested in teasing out the differences between man-made and naturally-produced aerosols, and also in discovering how each type influences the weather. At the same time, Glory was to use another instrument to investigate solar radiations.
“It would have made important measurements to the understanding of Earth as a system and the impacts of climate change,” explains the deputy associate administrator for programs at the NASA Science Division, Mike Luther.
“Because we can't easily distinguish what's what from space, we don't have good global coverage of exactly how much of the aerosol is anthropogenic, and how much is natural,” explains Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA.
“Glory would have provided the micro-physics and aerosol composition data that are currently not available from other satellite data,” concludes NASA Goddard Space Flight Center expert Mian Chin, quoted by Space.