OCO=Taurus-3110-24.02.09-Vandenberg- авария РН

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Carbon-sniffing satellite faces one-year delay

The launch of NASA's second Orbiting Carbon Observatory, under construction to replace a satellite lost in 2009, will be delayed at least one year after the space agency terminated an agreement for the carbon-tracking mission to lift off on a Taurus XL rocket, officials said Friday.

Officials with NASA and Orbital Sciences Corp., the Taurus XL contractor, told Spaceflight Now the arrangement to launch OCO 2 in February 2013 was canceled earlier this month.

Mike Curie, a spokesperson at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said the agency and Orbital Sciences agreed Feb. 2 to a bilateral contract modification leading to a "termination for convenience" of the Taurus XL launch contract for the OCO 2 satellite.

The parties "came to an understanding to no longer pursue the launch of OCO 2 on a Taurus XL," Curie said.

NASA released a multi-mission request for launch service proposals that included OCO 2 on Feb. 3, according to Curie. All rockets covered by the NASA Launch Services contract are eligible to compete to fly the OCO 2 spacecraft.

Once officials select a new rocket for OCO 2, Curie said NASA expects it will take about 27 months to launch the satellite. The timetable means OCO 2 will likely be grounded until at least mid-2014, more than a year after its previous target launch date.

The NLS contract includes United Launch Alliance's Delta 2 and Atlas 5 rockets, SpaceX's Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launchers, Lockheed Martin's Athena 1 and Athena 2 boosters and Orbital's air-launched Pegasus XL, which is too small to loft the 972-pound observatory into the necessary 438-mile-high orbit.

The Minotaur rocket, which is powered by government-owned retired ballistic missile stages, could also launch OCO 2. But before NASA selects the Minotaur for a launch, the agency must prove there are no commercial alternatives available. The Secretary of Defense must ultimately authorize the launch of a NASA primary payload on a Minotaur rocket.

While NASA holds another competition for OCO 2's launch, integration and testing of the satellite will continue, officials said. Orbital Sciences is building the spacecraft in Dulles, Va.
 
Designed to pinpoint manmade carbon dioxide emissions from cities and industrial zones, the OCO 2 mission was approved in 2010, less than a year after its predecessor was lost in a launch failure on another Taurus XL booster in February 2009.

OCO 2 will identify carbon sources and sinks, places where carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere and absorbed by oceans and plant life. Scientists say such information is pivotal to updating models of the carbon cycle and predicting how greenhouse gases will affect the climate in the future.

An investigation into the Taurus mishap in 2009 found no definitive root cause of the failure, but engineers implemented several recommended changes to the Taurus payload fairing separation system, which failed to jettison the shroud during launch of NASA's first Orbiting Carbon Observatory.

In its first mission since the OCO launch failure, the Taurus XL rocket suffered an almost identical anomaly in March 2011 when its payload fairing stayed attached to the booster after it was supposed to separate, dooming another NASA climate research satellite.

The failures cost NASA a combined $697 million.

The Taurus failure last year led NASA officials to rethink the agency's use of the solid-fueled launcher. Flying another NASA satellite on the Taurus XL would require the rocket be recertified, a lengthy and costly process that still may not yield a reliable launch vehicle, according to agency leaders.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1202/10oco2/

[Pol]

http://www.satnews.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?number=2121258094

February 27, 2012

NASA... Oh When, Oh When Can The OCO-2 Go...

Launch of the replacement Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) will be delayed at least into mid-2014....
....while NASA finds a new launch vehicle and fixes a problem in the spacecraft reaction wheel assemblies. After two launch failures with Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Taurus XL solid-fuel rocket, NASA has decided to try to launch its replacement on another vehicle. Possibilities include the Pegasus XL, Falcon 9, Delta II and Atlas V, according to Jim Norman, director of launch services at NASA headquarters. NASA pulled OCO-2 off the Taurus XL because company and government failure review boards were unable to pinpoint the precise cause for the back-to-back mishaps, Norman says. "We don't have a root cause, so we just felt it was too high-risk to continue," he says.

The agency and Orbital Sciences signed a bilateral contract modification Feb. 2 that terminates Orbital's task order to launch OCO-2 under its NASA Launch Services II (NLS-II) contract. The action does not end Orbital's NLS-II contract, which gives NASA different launch options under a "catalogue" approach. The U.S. space agency has released a new request for launch service proposals that includes the OCO-2 mission, along with the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS-1). Once one is awarded, NASA anticipates the normal 27-month turnaround time before launch of OCO-2, which was originally scheduled to fly in February 2013. That slipped to July 2014 because of the reaction wheel issues, NASA says. "There will be an impact to the original OCO-2 launch-readiness date of February 2013," the agency says. "However, we do not yet know how severe the impact will be."

The initial OCO spacecraft, which was designed to produce global maps of carbon dioxide sources and sinks for climate-change studies, was lost on Feb. 24, 2009. The Taurus XL fairing protecting it during the early phases of ascent failed to separate as planned, and pulled the spacecraft into the South Pacific. After that mishap, Orbital Sciences engineers modified the fairing-separation mechanism on the Taurus XL from a system using hot gas generated by pyrotechnics to a cold-gas system driven by bottled nitrogen, and made other risk-mitigation changes. But the new design also failed to separate the fairing on the Taurus XL that launched NASA's $424 million Glory mission on March 4, 2011, sending it to a Pacific splashdown as well.

An Orbital spokesman said that while the cold-gas separation mechanism has worked on subsequent launches of the company's Minotaur rocket, he was not prepared to comment on whether the company will rebid the OCO-2 launch. Orbital Sciences also provides the spacecraft bus for the OCO-2 mission, based on its LEOStar-2 design. Under the NLS contracts, NASA will be refunded about 25 percent of the cost of the OCO-1 launch. By terminating the OCO-2 mission order a month after the Glory failure, the government will be paid back half of what it had spent for that work, according to Norman.

While specific contract figures are proprietary, NLS launches in the Taurus XL class under the catalogue in effect when OCO-1 was lost fell into the $30-75 million range. Since then the contract range has been raised to $22-114 million, NASA says. Earth scientists still have a source of global carbon data in Japan's Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite "Ibuki," which was launched in 2009. But the Japanese orbiter returns "more than a factor of 100 fewer observations" during an orbit, and with limited coverage over the oceans, according to NASA. Delays in receiving ocean data from OCO-2 will hamper research, since oceans are an important sink for carbon dioxide.

Artistic rendition of the OCO-2 satellite, courtesy of NASA.

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Artistic rendition of the OCO-2 satellite, courtesy of NASA.

Это Лкросс и Центавр.

[Salo]

http://www.aviationweek.com/Blogs.aspx?plckBlogId=Blog:04ce340e-4b63-4d23-9695-d49ab661f385&plckPostId=Blog%3a04ce340e-4b63-4d23-9695-d49ab661f385Post%3a0c328f60-41df-4c18-b0bb-41bf87b1a0e2

Save Money, Test First
Posted by Amy Svitak 9:33 AM on Dec 18, 2012

AWST reader and commentator Tom Kueterman writes:

"I'm surprised the Orbital Sciences payload fairing issue has not yet been resolved! In the May 30, 2011 issue of AWST a letter to the editor was published "NASA CHECK YOUR APPROACH" asking why OSC would not do full scale testing of their payload fairing at NASA Plum Brook Station's Space Power Facility. NASA and contractors have performed full scale payload fairing deployment tests in this thermal vacuum chamber for years, and everyone who tests there has demonstrated successful fairing deployments in flight. However, to the best of my knowledge OSC has not discussed the idea of testing/qualifying their payload fairings at SPF. SAVE MONEY TEST FIRST."