[Launch Alert] Launch Schedules
Launch Alert
launch-alert at mailman.qth.net
Sun Apr 15 15:27:57 EDT 2012
LAUNCH ALERT
Brian Webb
Ventura County, California
launch-alert-editor at earthlink.net
www.spacearchive.info
2012 April 15 (Sunday) 12:22 PDT
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VANDENBERG AFB LAUNCH SCHEDULE
As of 2012 April 15
Launch
Time/Window
Date (PST/PDT) Vehicle Pad/Silo
-------- ----------------- ------------- --------
MAY 16 To be announced Minuteman III ---
Test launch. The Defense Department may release some details about the
launch a few days in advance.
AUG 2 To be announced Atlas V SLC-3E
Vehicle will launch the classified NROL-36 payload for the U.S.
National Reconnaissance Office. The vehicle will also reportedly carry
the following secondary payloads: CINEMA (Cubesat for Ion, Neutral,
Electron, Magnetic fields), University of California Berkeley; CSSWE
(Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment), University of Colorado at
Boulder; CP5, California Polytechnic University; CXBN (Cosmic X-ray
Background Nanosat) Morehead State University; ORSES (ORS Enabler
Satellite), US Army Space and Missile Defense Command; Aeneas,
Department of Homeland Security/University of Southern California;
Horus, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Re, Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory; and three Aerocube spacecraft.
DEC 1 06:32:24-06:37:24 Pegasus XL N/A
Vehicle will be air-dropped from an L-1011 jumbo jet flying offshore.
The aircraft will be staged from Vandenberg AFB. Launch occurs shortly
before sunrise and may create a weak Twilight Effect as exhaust at
high altitude is illuminated by the Sun
2012 To be announced Falcon 9 SLC-4E
Vehicle will launch a payload for MDA Corp. (Canada)
2012 To be announced Falcon Heavy SLC-4E
Falcon Heavy demonstration flight
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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NEW MEXICO LAUNCH SCHEDULE
As of 2012 April 15
All launches are suborbital
Launch
Time/Window
Date (MST/MDT) Location Vehicle
-------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------
APR Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.268 UG. Researcher: McCandliss, Johns Hopkins Univ.
APR Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.261 UG. Researcher: Clarke, Boston Univ.
MAY Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 45.006 UE. Researcher Woods, Univ. of Colorado
JUN Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.260 UG. Researcher: Cook, Boston Univ.
JUL Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.272 NS. Researcher: Cirtain, Marshall Spaceflight Center
JUL Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.284 NS. Researcher: Cirtain, Marshall Spaceflight Center
JUL Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.263 US. Researcher: Judge, USC
AUG Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.269 GS. Researcher: Rabin, Goddard Spaceflight Center
AUG Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.239 DS. Researcher: Korendyke, Naval Research Lab.
OCT Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.253 US. Researcher: Hassler, Southwest Research Inst.
OCT Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.271 UG. Researcher: Beasley, Univ. of Colorado
OCT Unknown White Sands Unknown
Mission: 36.262 UG. Researcher: Kaiser, Johns Hopkins Univ.
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 be incomplete and disagree with other sources. Details on
military launches are withheld until they are approved for public
release.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
WISE was launched from Vandenberg AFB in 2009 - Editor
NASA's WISE MISSION SEES SKIES ABLAZE WITH BLAZARS
NASA News Release
2012 April 12
WASHINGTON -- Astronomers are actively hunting a class of
supermassive black holes throughout the universe called blazars thanks
to data collected by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer
(WISE). The mission has revealed more than 200 blazars and has the
potential to find thousands more.
Blazars are among the most energetic objects in the universe. They
consist of supermassive black holes actively "feeding," or pulling
matter onto them, at the cores of giant galaxies. As the matter is
dragged toward the supermassive hole, some of the energy is released
in the form of jets traveling at nearly the speed of light. Blazars
are unique because their jets are pointed directly at us.
"Blazars are extremely rare because it's not too often that a
supermassive black hole's jet happens to point towards Earth," said
Franceso Massaro of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and
Cosmology near Palo Alto, Calif., and principal investigator of the
research, published in a series of papers in the Astrophysical
Journal. "We came up with a crazy idea to use WISE's infrared
observations, which are typically associated with lower-energy
phenomena, to spot high-energy blazars, and it worked better than we
hoped."
The findings ultimately will help researchers understand the extreme
physics behind super-fast jets and the evolution of supermassive black
holes in the early universe.
WISE surveyed the entire celestial sky in infrared light in 2010,
creating a catalog of hundreds of millions of objects of all types.
Its first batch of data was released to the larger astronomy community
in April 2011 and the full-sky data were released last month.
Massaro and his team used the first batch of data, covering more than
one-half the sky, to test their idea that WISE could identify blazars.
Astronomers often use infrared data to look for the weak heat
signatures of cooler objects. Blazars are not cool; they are scorching
hot and glow with the highest-energy type of light, called gamma rays.
However, they also give off a specific infrared signature when
particles in their jets are accelerated to almost the speed of light.
One of the reasons the team wants to find new blazars is to help
identify mysterious spots in the sky sizzling with high-energy gamma
rays, many of which are suspected to be blazars. NASA's Fermi mission
has identified hundreds of these spots, but other telescopes are
needed to narrow in on the source of the gamma rays.
Sifting through the early WISE catalog, the astronomers looked for the
infrared signatures of blazars at the locations of more than 300
gamma-ray sources that remain mysterious. The researchers were able to
show that a little more than half of the sources are most likely
blazars.
"This is a significant step toward unveiling the mystery of the many
bright gamma-ray sources that are still of unknown origin," said
Raffaele D'Abrusco, a co-author of the papers from Harvard Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "WISE's infrared vision is
actually helping us understand what's happening in the gamma-ray sky."
The team also used WISE images to identify more than 50 additional
blazar candidates and observed more than 1,000 previously discovered
blazars. According to Massaro, the new technique, when applied
directly to WISE's full-sky catalog, has the potential to uncover
thousands more.
"We had no idea when we were building WISE that it would turn out to
yield a blazar gold mine," said Peter Eisenhardt, WISE project
scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena,
Calif., who is not associated with the new studies. "That's the beauty
of an all-sky survey. You can explore the nature of just about any
phenomenon in the universe."
JPL manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate
in Washington. The principal investigator for WISE, Edward Wright, is
at UCLA. The mission was competitively 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 and archiving take place at the Infrared Processing and
Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in
Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more information about WISE, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/wise
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Copyright 2012, Brian Webb. All rights reserved. No portion of this
newsletter may be used without identifying Launch Alert as the
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http://www.spacearchive.info/newsletter.htm.
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