Jan 12 2003
From The Space Library
A Delta 2 rocket carried NASA's Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) into orbit, launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. ICE Sat was one in a series of Earth Observing System (EOS) spacecraft to follow the Terra satellite, launched in December 1999, and the Aqua satellite, launched in May 2002. NASA had designed the 661-pound (299.8-kilogram) craft to measure the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, so that scientists could determine whether global sea levels were rising or falling. The craft's only instrument, the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System, would beam rapid pulses of laser light to the icy surface, and the ice sheets would reflect the light back to the satellite, acting like radar. The GPS would determine the ICESat's location as it fired its laser, enabling program scientists to measure the ice sheets' topography. The rocket also carried a second, smaller craft into orbit~ CHIPSat, NASA's 131-pound (59-kilogram), University Explorer Class probe, the Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer. CHIPSat would gather data on the origin, physical processes, and properties of the hot gas between stars. The CHIPSat mission was the first U.S. mission to use end-to-end satellite operations over the Internet, treating the craft “something like a node on the Internet.(NASA, “NASA Successfully Launches ICE and CHIPS Satellites,” news release 03-011, 13 January 2003, ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/2003/03-011.txt (accessed 22 July 2008); Associated Press, “Rocket Carrying NASA Satellites Launched,” 12 January 2003; Jim Banke, “Boeing Launches Pair of Science Research Satellites for NASA,” Space. com, 12 January 2003, http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/delta2_launch_030112.html (accessed 22 July 2008).
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