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Finally! CALIPSO Starts Orbital Dance: The Mission Begins at Last for a Satellite With Links to NASA Langley and Hampton University.

Posted on: Saturday, 29 April 2006, 15:00 CDT

By Jim Hodges, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.

Apr. 29--Tardy by a week and 14.721 seconds, the rocket carrying the CALIPSO satellite lifted off Friday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. - ending a nerve-wracking seven days of preparation and disappointment.

At 16.721 seconds past 6:02 a.m. EDT, the $60 million Boeing Delta II rocket headed into the dark, cloudy California sky, taking with it a NASA Langley Research Center-conceived satellite that will use laser technology to measure the thickness of clouds and aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere from an orbit 438 miles aloft.

CALIPSO was paired at the top of the rocket with CLOUDSAT, which will offer horizontal measurements to couple with those of CALIPSO.

"It's nice to have this part of the mission done," said Dave Winker, a NASA Langley atmospheric scientist who is CALIPSO's principal investigator. "It's been a long week."

It's seemed even longer for Mike West, a NASA Langley pilot whose promise to children Grace, 12; Betsy, 10; and Zach, 6, has finally been fulfilled. All it took was 6,000 miles and a lot of early, disappointing mornings.

While West's wife, Mary Beth, was in Toulouse, France, as mission operations manager and liaison with NASA's French partners, West took the children to California for a family camping trip and to watch the first scheduled launch. They were at Vandenberg on April 21, when the mission was scrubbed with 48 seconds left because of a loss of communications with France.

"Well, they got to see the rocket up close," West said.

The family returned Sunday to get the children back into school after spring vacation, and subsequent mission scrubs on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were greeted with dismay.

At least the children got to sleep in until time for school most of the days.

Not so their father.

"I would get a call at 4:30 in the morning from Toulouse from my wife, telling me whether it was worth it to get them up," West said.

On Friday, it was.

They gathered at NASA Langley, watched CALIPSO being launched and then headed for school.

West went to work, safe in the knowledge that on Monday, Mary Beth comes home from France to help with the children.

The French took over CALIPSO's movements when the satellite separated from the rocket about 62 minutes after Friday's launch. France has a $75 million stake in the $298 million project.

Hampton University is also a partner. The school will process data from CALIPSO to validate the mission. It's also leading an outreach program that involves middle school teachers and students.

Pat McCormick, co-head of the department of atmospheric studies at Hampton University, is a lidar pioneer and carries the title of co-principal investigator for the CALIPSO mission.

The lidar is the final system that will be turned on when the satellite reaches its prescribed orbit, in a line with four other satellites in an "A-train" that will provide different atmospheric data.

"The satellite is in a 'parking' orbit now," said Winker, who's returning to Langley briefly before going on to Toulouse. "(The French) will be bringing up systems, so that we can begin to turn the payload on."

The process, from launch to data stream, takes about a month.

When the transmissions begin to arrive, CALIPSO will offer a vertical look at clouds, providing at least 13 different measurements.

That data, coupled with information from CLOUDSAT, will provide a three-dimensional look at clouds and aerosols that affect the Earth's climate.

"Finally," Winker said - summing up the feelings of people from California to France, with those of a lot of people on the Peninsula in between.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.

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Source: Daily Press

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