Cape Canaveral, Fla. – The launch of NASA’s first spacecraft to Pluto was delayed again today after strong winds caused a power outage at the mission’s control center in Laurel, Md.
The control center, which will operate the spacecraft in flight and is located on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, operated on backup power after the primary power was cut by gusty winds that hit 68 miles per hour. Mission managers postponed the launch because they “wanted to have sufficient backup to those systems in place before conducting critical launch and early flight operations,” NASA said in a statement.
The launch has been rescheduled for Thursday between 11:08 a.m. to 1:07 p.m. mountain time at Kennedy Space Center.
The mission has a launch window that extends through Feb. 14. If it launches before Feb. 3, New Horizons would get a speed boost from flying past Jupiter that would allow it to reach Pluto by July 2015. If the craft misses the gravity assist, the earliest it could reach Pluto would be 2019.
“It’s important,” principal investigator Alan Stern said of hitting the earlier launch window to receive the Jupiter speed boost. “But it’s more important to have a safe launch.”
The project has strong local ties. Stern, a Boulder resident and a scientist with Southwest Research Institute, said Colorado has had more workers on the mission than any other state. Lockheed Martin Corp.’s employees at its Waterton Canyon plant in Jefferson County built the Atlas V rocket that will launch the spacecraft. Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Boulder built a camera and the University of Colorado at Boulder built a dust counter. Both instruments are on the scientific payload. Also, Starsys Research in Boulder built hardware that helps control the spacecraft’s temperature.
Scientists hope the probe of Pluto will lead to details about the early formation of the solar system.
Andy Vuong can be reached at avuong@denverpost.com or 303-820-1209.
