The Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo freighter are set for launch at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 UTC) from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. This particular time of liftoff might provide an interesting sky show for those along the Middle-Atlantic coast. For most locations, sunset will have occurred about 45 minutes earlier; the Sun at the scheduled liftoff time will be approximately 9 degrees below the horizon. Visibility of the Antares first stage will rely upon the light emitted by twin AJ26 main engines, which were built in Russia in the 1970s; imported to the United States and upgraded with modern systems by Aerojet Rocketdyne. The Antares rocket will fire its AJ26 engines for nearly four minutes before letting go of the first stage to fall back into the sea. At T + 5 minutes 40 seconds, the Antares will ignite a solid-fueled Castor 30XL upper stage motor made by ATK to send it into orbit. Its altitude at this point will be about 106 miles (171 km). At this height -- if my calculations are correct -- the vehicle will have risen into sunlight and the resultant exhaust trail from the Castor 30XL upper stage motor will be illuminated leaving a long, glowing contrail in its wake. While many West Coast residents may be quite familiar with such launch sightings by Minotaur rocket launchings from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, they are very here rare in the East, and as such may end up surprising millions of people if Antares launches on Monday evening as planned. Does anybody have any thoughts to add on this? -- joe rao _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Sat Oct 25 2014 - 15:50:48 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Sat Oct 25 2014 - 20:50:48 UTC