[Launch Alert] Vandenberg AFB Launch Schedule

Sat Oct 2 20:42:35 EDT 2010

                             LAUNCH ALERT

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

                               2010 October 2 (Saturday) 17:21 PDT
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                   VANDENBERG AFB LAUNCH SCHEDULE
                        As of 2010 October 2

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

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  

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

FEB 23		02:10				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).  

MAR			To be announced		Minotaur I
SLC-8
Vehicle will launch the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office's NROL-66
payload  

MAR-MAY		To be announced		Atlas V		SLC-3E
Vehicle will launch the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office's NROL-34
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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   Newly Discovered Planet May Be First Truly Habitable Exoplanet

   Discovery suggests our galaxy may be teeming with potentially
   habitable planets

         University of California, Santa Cruz News Release
                            2010 SEP 29

SANTA CRUZ, CA--A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of
Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three
times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that
places it squarely in the middle of the star's "habitable zone," where
liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. If confirmed, this
would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first
strong case for a potentially habitable one.

To astronomers, a "potentially habitable" planet is one that could
sustain life, not necessarily one that humans would consider a nice
place to live. Habitability depends on many factors, but liquid water
and an atmosphere are among the most important. 

"Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable
planet," said Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at
UC Santa Cruz. "The fact that we were able to detect this planet so
quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really
common."

The findings are based on 11 years of observations at the W. M. Keck
Observatory in Hawaii. "Advanced techniques combined with
old-fashioned ground-based telescopes continue to lead the exoplanet
revolution," said Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution. "Our
ability to find potentially habitable worlds is now limited only by
our telescope time."

Vogt and Butler lead the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey. The team's
new findings are reported in a paper to be published in the
Astrophysical Journal and posted online at arXiv.org. Coauthors
include associate research scientist Eugenio Rivera of UC Santa Cruz;
associate astronomer Nader Haghighipour of the University of
Hawaii-Manoa; and research scientists Gregory Henry and Michael
Williamson of Tennessee State University. 

The paper reports the discovery of two new planets around the nearby
red dwarf star Gliese 581. This brings the total number of known
planets around this star to six, the most yet discovered in a
planetary system other than our own solar system. Like our solar
system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly circular orbits.

The most interesting of the two new planets is Gliese 581g, with a
mass three to four times that of the Earth and an orbital period of
just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky
planet with a definite surface and that it has enough gravity to hold
on to an atmosphere, according to Vogt. 

Gliese 581, located 20 light years away from Earth in the
constellation Libra, has a somewhat checkered history of
habitable-planet claims. Two previously detected planets in the system
lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side (planet c)
and one on the cold side (planet d). While some astronomers still
think planet d may be habitable if it has a thick atmosphere with a
strong greenhouse effect to warm it up, others are skeptical. The
newly discovered planet g, however, lies right in the middle of the
habitable zone.

"We had planets on both sides of the habitable zone--one too hot and
one too cold--and now we have one in the middle that's just right,"
Vogt said.

The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is
always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the
side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness. One effect of
this is to stabilize the planet's surface climates, according to Vogt.
The most habitable zone on the planet's surface would be the line
between shadow and light (known as the "terminator"), with surface
temperatures decreasing toward the dark side and increasing toward the
light side.

"Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to
choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude," Vogt
said.

The researchers estimate that the average surface temperature of the
planet is between -24 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 to -12 degrees
Celsius). Actual temperatures would range from blazing hot on the side
facing the star to freezing cold on the dark side.  

If Gliese 581g has a rocky composition similar to the Earth's, its
diameter would be about 1.2 to 1.4 times that of the Earth. The
surface gravity would be about the same or slightly higher than
Earth's, so that a person could easily walk upright on the planet,
Vogt said.

The new findings are based on 11 years of observations of Gliese 581
using the HIRES spectrometer (designed by Vogt) on the Keck I
Telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The spectrometer
allows precise measurements of a star's radial velocity (its motion
along the line of sight from Earth), which can reveal the presence of
planets. The gravitational tug of an orbiting planet causes periodic
changes in the radial velocity of the host star. Multiple planets
induce complex wobbles in the star's motion, and astronomers use
sophisticated analyses to detect planets and determine their orbits
and masses. 

"It's really hard to detect a planet like this," Vogt said. "Every
time we measure the radial velocity, that's an evening on the
telescope, and it took more than 200 observations with a precision of
about 1.6 meters per second to detect this planet."

To get that many radial velocity measurements (238 in total), Vogt's
team combined their HIRES observations with published data from
another group led by the Geneva Observatory (HARPS, the High Accuracy
Radial velocity Planetary Search project). 

In addition to the radial velocity observations, coauthors Henry and
Williamson made precise night-to-night brightness measurements of the
star with one of Tennessee State University's robotic telescopes. "Our
brightness measurements verify that the radial velocity variations are
caused by the new orbiting planet and not by any process within the
star itself," Henry said. 

The researchers also explored the implications of this discovery with
respect to the number of stars that are likely to have at least one
potentially habitable planet. Given the relatively small number of
stars that have been carefully monitored by planet hunters, this
discovery has come surprisingly soon. 

"If these are rare, we shouldn't have found one so quickly and so
nearby," Vogt said. "The number of systems with potentially habitable
planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 percent, and when you
multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way,
that's a large number. There could be tens of billions of these
systems in our galaxy."

This research was supported by grants from the National Science
Foundation and NASA.

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