This will be a very clean Pluto probe, because the launch was scrubbed again for today (har har). Evidently there was a power outage at Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland (down the road from where I used to live!), and they are the folks running the show.
The launch has been rescheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, January 19. The launch window is from 18:08 to 21:07 Universal time (10:08 – 1:08 Pacific time).
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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January 18th, 2006 at 10:30 am
I just hope they launch on time to get jupiter’s gravitational boost. What was the launch time frame in order to get it?
January 18th, 2006 at 10:41 am
Take a look here: http://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av010/051129windows.html
Short answer: they’re good if they launch in January.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:52 am
It was a pretty widespread outage, accompanied by some surges when the power would trip back on. My office next to the Laurel City Hall was left twiddling its thumbs from frequent power loss and surges till about 10am this morning. The surges blew (spectacularly) at least one uninterruptable power supply, causing our network admin to shut down the system as a precaution.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:58 am
I appreciate the coverage! The updates from BABlog are more informative than almost every other source!
January 18th, 2006 at 11:03 am
It probably wouldn’t have gone anyway. Today’s winds are worse than yesterdays…I work at Patrick AFB just down the road from Cape Canaveral. We support the launches.
January 18th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
woo! i get to skip class a *third* time.
January 18th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Wow, the Plutonians are really going out of their way to keep us from finding out about them.
January 18th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
I’m convinced they keep moving the launch back just so I have to continually readjust the countdown clock on my blog. Conspiracy!
January 18th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
Interesting coincidence; I grew up just across US 29 from APL in the eighties.
January 18th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
I hope the spacecraft doesn’t disappear before it sees “The Face On Pluto”. Why doesn’t NASA just send a Class V probe?
January 19th, 2006 at 9:30 am
Thursday:
Sitting here at work again finger poised on the streaming video player software all ready to suck bandwidth and watch the launch!
January 19th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
I was a grad student at Johns Hopkins and U of Maryland in the sciences from the mid-70’s through the early 80’s. I had some contact with APL, and even knew a couple of people affiliated there. Would have loved to work there, but it never materialized.
(At that time APL had some sort of affiliation with JHU. Still true?”