[Launch Alert] Vandenberg AFB Launch Schedule

Fri Jul 16 23:19:18 EDT 2010

                             LAUNCH ALERT

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

                                   2010 July 16 (Friday) 20:10 PDT
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                   VANDENBERG AFB LAUNCH SCHEDULE
                         As of 2010 July 16

                       Launch
                    Time/Window
  Date               (PST/PDT)             Vehicle          Pad/Silo
--------		---------------		----------
--------

AUG?			Evening			Minotaur IV
SLC-8
Payload is the Space-Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) satellite.
Delayed from OCT due to concerns with the launch vehicle. Delayed from
July 8 due to a software anomaly discovered with a Minotaur IV at the
factory. Vehicle will insert the payload into a 540 km circular orbit
with an inclination of 98°  

SEP			To be announced		Minuteman III	---
Vehicle will probably send one or more unarmed warheads on a ballistic
trajectory to the central Pacific  

SEP 7			To be announced		Atlas V		SLC-3E
Vehicle will launch the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office's NROL-41
payload  

OCT 29		19:21-19:34			Delta II
SLC-2W
Vehicle will launch the COSMO-SkyMed 4 radar Earth-imaging satellite.
Launch window opens near the end of deep evening twilight  

NOV 22		02:09				Taurus XL		576E
Payload is the Glory scientific satellite. Vehicle will carry three
small satellites as secondary payloads: Explorer 1 Prime (Montana State
University), Hermes (University of Colorado), and KySat-1 (Kentucky
space consortium).  

JAN 15		To be announced		Delta IV Heavy	SLC-6
Vehicle will launch the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office's NROL-49
payload  

The above schedule is a composite of unclassified information
approved for public release from government, industry, and other
sources. It represents the Editor's best effort to produce a schedule,
but may disagree with other sources. Details on military launches are
withheld until they are approved for public release. For official
information regarding Vandenberg AFB activities, go to
http://www.vandenberg.af.mil.

All launch dates and times are given in Pacific Time using a 24-hour
format similar to military time (midnight = 00:00, 1:00 p.m. = 13:00,
11:00 p.m. = 23:00, etc.). 

The dates and times in this schedule may not agree with those on other
online launch schedules, including the official Vandenberg AFB
schedule because different sources were used, the information was
interpreted differently, and the schedules were updated at different
times. 

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WISE was launched from Vandenberg AFB last December 14 - Editor

        NASA's WISE MISSION TO COMPLETE EXTENSIVE SKY SURVEY
              Jet Propulsion Laboratory News Release
                            2010 July 16

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or
WISE, will complete its first survey of the entire sky on July 17,
2010. The mission has generated more than one million images so far,
of everything from asteroids to distant galaxies.

"Like a globe-trotting shutterbug, WISE has completed a world tour
with 1.3 million slides covering the whole sky," said Edward Wright,
the principal investigator of the mission at the University of
California, Los Angeles.

Some of these images have been processed and stitched together into a
new picture being released today. It shows the Pleiades cluster of
stars, also known as the Seven Sisters, resting in a tangled bed of
wispy dust. The pictured region covers seven square degrees, or an
area equivalent to 35 full moons, highlighting the telescope's ability
to take wide shots of vast regions of space.

The new picture was taken in February. It shows infrared light from
WISE's four detectors in a range of wavelengths. This infrared view
highlights the region's expansive dust cloud, through which the Seven
Sisters and other stars in the cluster are passing. Infrared light
also reveals the smaller and cooler stars of the family. 

To view the new image, as well as previously released WISE images,
visit http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu .

"The WISE all-sky survey is helping us sift through the immense and
diverse population of celestial objects," said Hashima Hasan, WISE
Program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "It's a great
example of the high impact science that's possible from NASA's
Explorer Program."

The first release of WISE data, covering about 80 percent of the sky,
will be delivered to the astronomical community in May of next year.
The mission scanned strips of the sky as it orbited around the
Earth's poles since its launch last December. WISE always stays over
the Earth's day-night line. As the Earth moves around the sun, new
slices of sky come into the telescope's field of view. It has taken
six months, or the amount of time for Earth to travel halfway around
the sun, for the mission to complete one full scan of the entire sky.

For the next three months, the mission will map half of the sky
again. This will enhance the telescope's data, revealing more hidden
asteroids, stars and galaxies. The mapping will give astronomers a
look at what's changed in the sky. The mission will end when the
instrument's block of solid hydrogen coolant, needed to chill its
infrared detectors, runs out.

"The eyes of WISE have not blinked since launch," said William Irace,
the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif. "Both our telescope and spacecraft have performed
flawlessly and have imaged every corner of our universe, just as we
planned."

So far, WISE has observed more than 100,000 asteroids, both known
and previously unseen. Most of these space rocks are in the main belt
between Mars and Jupiter. However, some are near-Earth objects,
asteroids and comets with orbits that pass relatively close to Earth.
WISE has discovered more than 90 of these new near-Earth objects. The
infrared telescope is also good at spotting comets that orbit far
from Earth and has discovered more than a dozen of these so far. 

WISE's infrared vision also gives it a unique ability to pick up the
glow of cool stars, called brown dwarfs, in addition to distant
galaxies bursting with light and energy. These galaxies are called
ultra-luminous infrared galaxies. WISE can see the brightest of them.

"WISE is filling in the blanks on the infrared properties of
everything in the universe from nearby asteroids to distant quasars,"
said Peter Eisenhardt of JPL, project scientist for WISE. "But the
most exciting discoveries may well be objects we haven't yet imagined
exist."

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

For more information about WISE, visit http://www.nasa.gov/wise and
http://wise.astro.ucla.edu .

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