UPDATE: UNH radiation-belt satellite launch delayed to Saturday

Posted by David Brooks | Thursday, August 23, 2012

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Artist's conception of the RBSP satellites, courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Two identical Radiation Belt Storm Probes will follow similar orbits that will take them through the inner and outer radiation belts. The highly elliptical orbits range from a minimum altitude of approximately 373 miles to a maximum altitude of approximately 23,000 miles

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UPDATE: THe launch was pushed back 24 hours because of "a drift in the signal of a C-Band transponder aboard the Atlas V rocket. It is not yet known if the issue was in the ground-based range detection equipment or in the Atlas V transponder." So says NASA.

Harlan Spence, director of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at UNH, is unlikely to get much sleep tonight. Between 4 and 4:27 tomorrow morning, NASA is scheduled to launch the twin Radiation Belt Storm Probes that carry equipment for which he is lead scientist. Years of his work will be sitting atop a big, dangerous machine.

I'm supposed to interview him after 7 a.m. Let's hope the rocket doesn't blow up on the launch pad - he'd be bummed.

UNH News Services has an article about the probes (read it here):

Collectively, the mission's five instrument suites will make the most precise measurements to date of the high-energy particles and magnetic and electric fields and waves in this near-Earth region of space where "space weather" occurs and hundreds of spacecraft operate.