[Launch Alert] Minuteman III Launch

Tue Aug 18 21:20:27 EDT 2009

                             LAUNCH ALERT

                              Brian Webb
                     Ventura County, California
                         kd6nrp at earthlink.net
                     http://www.spacearchive.info

                                2009 August 18 (Tuesday) 18:14 PDT
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              VANDENBERG SCHEDULES MINUTEMAN III LAUNCH
                    Vandenberg AFB Press Release
                           2009 August 18

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. - An unarmed Minuteman III
intercontinental ballistic missile configured with a joint test
assembly is scheduled to launch from North Vandenberg Sunday between
3:01 a.m. to 9:01 a.m.

The launch is an operational test to determine the weapon system's
reliability and accuracy. 

The missile's single unarmed re-entry vehicle is expected to travel
approximately 4,190 miles, hitting a pre-determined target near the
Kwajalein Atoll.  

The 576th Flight Test Squadron, which will direct the missile launch,
installed tracking, telemetry and command destruct systems on the
missile to collect data and meet safety requirements. Maintenance and
operations task force personnel from the 341st Missile Wing, Malmstrom
AFB, Montana are conducting operational tasks supporting the launch.  

Col. Steven Winters, the 30th Space Wing vice commander, is the launch
decision authority for this mission. Col. Carl T. DeKemper, the 576th
FLTS commander, is the mission director. A crew from Malmstrom AFB
will launch the missile under the direction of the 576th FLTS.  

This launch, the second of three in 2009, comes at a time of change
within the missile world, as the Air Force moves closer to combining
its nuclear missile and bomber assets into the newly created Global
Strike Command.

"Our team is dedicated to ensuring a credible, safe and combat-ready
ICBM force that convinces potential adversaries of our unwavering
commitment to defend our nation, its allies and friends," said Colonel
Dekemper. "This dedication will continue as the ICBM mission transfers
to Air Force Global Strike Command."

The test also comes as the missile community commemorates 50 years of
nuclear deterrence. For the past 50 years Vandenberg has been a key US
Air Force installation used in the development and operational
validation of our nation's intercontinental ballistic missile fleet. 

The entire ICBM community, including the Department of Defense and the
Department of Energy, will use the data collected from this mission
for continuing force development evaluation.  

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              NASA's WISE MISSION ARRIVES AT LAUNCH SITE
                Jet Propulsion Laboratory News Release
                           2009 August 17

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or
WISE, has arrived at its last stop on Earth -- Vandenberg Air Force
Base, Calif. 

WISE is scheduled to blast into space in December, aboard a United
Launch Alliance Delta II rocket from NASA's Space Launch Complex 2.
Orbiting around Earth, it will scan the entire sky at infrared
wavelengths, unveiling hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and
hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies.

The spacecraft arrived at Vandenberg along the central California
coast today, after a winding journey via truck from Ball Aerospace &
Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colo. Ball built the mission's
spacecraft; its telescope and science instrument were built by Space
Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. 

"WISE has arrived and is almost ready to go," said William Irace, the
mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif. "After we check the spacecraft out and fill the
telescope cooling tanks with solid hydrogen, we'll mate it to the
rocket and launch." 

WISE is an infrared space telescope like two currently orbiting
missions, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space
Observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA
participation. But, unlike these missions, WISE will survey the entire
sky. It is designed to cast a wide net to catch all sorts of unseen
cosmic treasures. Millions of images from the survey will serve as
rough maps for other observatories, such as Spitzer and NASA's
upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, guiding them to intriguing
targets. 

"WISE will survey the cosmic landscape in the infrared so that future
telescopes can home in on the most interesting 'properties,'" said
Edward Wright, the principal investigator for the mission at UCLA. 

The infrared surveyor will pick up the heat from a cornucopia of
objects, both near and far. It will find hundreds of thousands of new
asteroids in our main asteroid belt, and hundreds of near-Earth
objects, which are comets and asteroids with orbits that pass
relatively close to Earth. The mission will uncover the coldest stars,
called brown dwarfs, perhaps even one closer to us than our closest
known neighbor, Proxima Centauri, which is 4 light-years away. More
distant finds will include nurseries of stars, swirling
planet-building disks and the universe's most luminous galaxies
billions of light-years away. 

The data will help answer fundamental questions about how solar
systems and galaxies form, and will provide the astronomical community
with mountains of data to mine.

"WISE will create a legacy that endures for decades," said Peter
Eisenhardt, the mission's project scientist at JPL. "Today, we still
refer to the catalogue of our predecessor, the Infrared Astronomical
Satellite, which operated in 1983."

The Infrared Astronomical Satellite was a joint infrared survey
mission between NASA, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. WISE's
survey, thanks to next-generation technology, will be hundreds of
times more sensitive.

The mission will scan the sky from a sun-synchronous orbit, 500
kilometers (about 311 miles) above Earth. After a one-month checkout
period, it will map the whole sky over a period of six months. Onboard
frozen hydrogen, which will cool the infrared detectors, is expected
to last several months longer, allowing WISE to map much of the sky a
second time and see what has changed.

JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate. The mission's principal investigator, Edward
Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under
NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics
Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball
Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and
data processing will take place at the Infrared Processing and
Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Caltech manages JPL for NASA. 

NASA's Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida
is responsible for government oversight of the Delta II and launch
countdown management.

More information is online at http://wise.astro.ucla.edu .

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