LADEE, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer robotic probe launched Friday night atop an Orbital Sciences Corporation Minotaur V rocket. The first deep space mission from Wallops Flight Facility, LADEE will orbit the moon to collect information about its atmosphere and environmental influences on lunar dust.
Data from LADEE will help scientists better understand other planetary bodies in our solar system.
NASA: 'The nighttime launch of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft is currently scheduled for Friday at 11:27 p.m. EDT (0327 Sept. 7 GMT). The mission will lift off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., and you can watch its flight thanks to smartphone apps, viewing maps and several agency-sponsored special events.'"
In correspondence with NASA's Glenn Facility, I wrote this this morning:
"I enjoyed the launch from Miami watching the live feed and listening to the NASA radio broadcast on my Android as i sat in the field not too far from home.
Slight haze and no visual took me home where I gathered Lat and long and Ladee altitude data from the NASA Live feed and fed them into my spreadsheet which told me why I saw nothing (and taught me a "non-euclidean" lesson):
LADEE never "broke" through my horizon altitude, always below (and increasingly below with increasing distance). See the image at
http://shawnbeightol.com/ladeeprofile.jpg or at very bottom of interactive launch spreadsheet found at
www.tinyurl.com/rocketalt ."
