Glory, E1P, Hermes, KySat-1

Spacecraft n°:

US spacecraft n°:

Launch data: Designation  11F01 Launch date  04 Mar 2011 - 10:09 UT Launch site  Va, 576E Launch vehicle  Taurus-XL 3110 Mission  Climate, Science & Technology (2 sat) Perigee / Apogee   km Eccentricity   Inclination   deg Period   min

Glory satellite

Satellites in fairing

Spacecraft data:

E1P satellite

Hermes satellite

KySat satellite

Mission details:

• The Orbital Sciences Taurus rocket suffered its second launch failure in a row on Mar 4, 2011. Once again the fairing failed to separate, and the extra mass being carried by the rocket meant that after stage 4 burnout the velocity was a few tenths of a km/s too low, giving the payload the correct orbital apogee but a negative perigee with impact probably in the Antarctic.
• Orbital says that they used a different fairing separation system on this flight, one that has flown successfully in the past year on the Minotaur rocket, but the similar nature of the failure to the one that destroyed the Orbiting Carbon Observatory mission on the previous launch will inevitably be a blow to the company's reputation. The T8 failure was thought to be due to the failure of the separation system to pressurize; on this T9 flight, the system did pressurize but the fairing still did not separate. It may turn out that the pressurization issue wasn't the true cause of the T8 problem either.
• The main instrument on NASA's Glory satellite lost in the Taurus flight 9 failure was an aerosol polarimetry sensor (APS) that would have provided a global map of aerosol particulates (soot and sulphates) which would have helped calibrate climate change models. This compounds the loss of OCO on Taurus flight 8, which would have made a global map of carbon dioxide. Even if a replacement APS is built, the delay of several years in these projects seems to be a significant blow to climate change research, a few years delay in improving our understanding of climate change may really matter to the world. Glory also carried a radiometer to measure the total solar output; this would have replaced the one that has been flying on the SORCE satellite since 2003.
• Three cubesat payloads were also lost in the launch: Montana State University's Explorer 1 Prime, the University of Colorado's Hermes and the University of Kentucky's KySat-1.