Posted: Thu, Nov 25, 2004, 9:09 AM ET (1409 GMT)
NASA announced Wednesday that it has pushed back the launches of two missions into early 2005. Deep Impact, originally scheduled to lift off atop a Delta 2 on December 30, has now been rescheduled for launch no earlier than January 8. The delay will give engineers more time to evaluate mission software, although NASA said in a status report that there are no significant problems with the spacecraft itself. Deep Impact is designed to fly by a comet, deploying a probe that will impact into the comet's nucleus. Deep Impact's launch window runs through late January. NASA also said Wednesday that the launch of the DART (Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology) spacecraft has been rescheduled for no earlier than March 2, 2005. That launch had been planned for late October, but was delayed several times for weather and technical reasons; the most recent delay was to allow engineers time to review g-force loading data on the spacecraft. That analysis is still in progress, according to NASA. DART is designed to test autonomous rendezvous technologies by approaching an existing low Earth orbit satellite, MUBLCOM, using only the sensors and computers on the spacecraft itself.
