UCF-led science mission survives Ariane 5 launch scare

James Dean
Florida Today

A University of Central Florida team of scientists and engineers breathed a sigh of relief after a NASA-funded mission they are leading survived trouble during Thursday’s launch on an Ariane 5 rocket.

An Ariane 5 rocket carrying NASA's GOLD mission, led by the University of Central Florida, blasted off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 5:20 p.m. EST Thursday, Jan. 26, 2018.

The $55 million GOLD mission — short for Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk — blasted off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 5:20 p.m. EST Thursday.

Launch teams lost telemetry from the rocket about nine minutes into the flight, shortly after the upper-stage engine ignited.

“Initial investigations show that the situation results from a trajectory deviation,” launcher Arianespace said Friday.

The rocket company acknowledged a problem after the launch, and the fate of the two satellites lifted by the Ariane 5 at first was uncertain.

But Arianespace later confirmed both satellites reached orbit.

The first of those deployed, called SES-14, carried the GOLD mission’s microwave oven-sized science instrument, which is designed to study the region where Earth’s upper-atmosphere interacts with space.

Artist rendering of the SES-14 satellite, the commercial communications spacecraft carrying the GOLD mission's science instrument as NASA's first hosted payload.

The mission is NASA’s first flying as a “hosted payload,” where an instrument occupies space on a commercial satellite with an unrelated mission rather than using a dedicated NASA spacecraft. That arrangement saves money.

Luxembourg-based SES, one of the world’s largest operators of communications satellites, confirmed Friday that it had established contact with SES-14.

The satellite was healthy but not in its intended orbit. As a result, the mission will need an extra month to climb to an orbit high above Brazil, 22,300 miles over the equator.

The satellite already was expected to take more than four months to reach its final orbit, because it relies on electric rather than chemical propulsion to circularize an initially egg-shaped orbit.

"As the spacecraft is in good health, we expect no effect on the quality of observations and data," NASA said in a statement.

Arianespace has launched an independent investigation into what went wrong Thursday, led by the European Space Agency.

The rocket’s performance will be of keen interest to NASA, which next year hopes to launch the $9 billion James Webb Space Telescope — a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope — on the European launcher.

GOLD was a breakthrough when NASA awarded UCF the mission in 2013. It was the first time a Florida university would serve as the lead on a NASA science mission.

Members of NASA's GOLD mission science team gathered with the instrument at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics on Dec. 1, 2016, before the instrument was shipped to Toulouse, France, for integration with the SES-14 statellite.

Since then, Merritt Island resident Richard Eastes, the mission’s top scientist, has moved on from UCF to the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Sciences, which built the instrument.

But UCF is still considered the mission’s leader and houses a data center that will collect measurements from GOLD’s ultraviolet imaging spectrograph.

"It’s a great accomplishment for UCF," Eastes said before the launch.

The mission is expected to improve space weather predictions and the fundamental understanding of a region of space through which astronauts fly and critical communications and navigation signals are beamed to the ground.

GOLD initially was expected to launch from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. But last August, SES announced that it had swapped payloads between rockets, moving SES-12 to the Falcon 9 and SES-14 to the Ariane 5.

SES is a partner in the next Falcon 9 launch, targeted for 4:25 p.m. Tuesday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668

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