This is Delta launch control at T minus 46 minutes and counting and everything continues to go well and on schedule today for a launch of
the CALIPSO and CloudSat spacecraft and I have with me, right now, Kevin Brown who is the CALIPSO project manager. Kevin, thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
Could you give just a short overview of the CALIPSO mission? What it's all about?
Ok, Well, the primary mission of CALIPSO is to measure clouds and aerosol in the atmosphere with aerosols being basically any
particulate matter: dust and fine sand and things that are carried aloft by the winds.
The unique thing about CALIPSO is that it doesn't just map the geographical location of these particles in the clouds,
but also it can measure the altitude and the different layers that there are because they are generally moving in different directions.
And this will be a first for NASA.
Most instruments, primary instruments up until now have measured just the top view looking down from space. The unique thing about
CALIPSO, similar to CloudSat, is that it probes the atmosphere actively and for CALIPSO it is with a LIDAR instrument.
That is a laser based radar, it works just like radar except it uses pulses of laser light instead of radio waves.
There are also two imagers on board, an infrared and a visible imager helps us correlate what we are looking at it.
And the result will be really an unprecedented data set - a view of our Earth.
It will cover the whole globe and it will do it for, we'll run this mission for 3 years.
Okay.
So, we'll have a very good data set of the atmosphere and how things are evolving over seasons and over long term trends.
Well, we are going to launch here in just under an hour and a half. Once we get on orbit, once the spacecraft gets on
orbit what's going to happen over the next couple of weeks or months? Are we going to go through a check out process?
Yes, we are released from the launch vehicle about 62 minutes after launch and the satellite will go in
automatically go into a mode where it starts activating and unfolding its solar arrays.
About 8 minutes after that separation we will make first contact with it and that will obviously be the start of constant communications
with it and we will be activating the spacecraft systems one at a time over, basically over the first six weeks.
So, by six weeks into the mission we will be transitioning to full time science operations.
Very good. And, of course, we're going to be in constant communication with this spacecraft.
I mean, the data is going to be delivered to certain parts of the agency.
Can you tell us maybe a little bit about what's going to be happening?
What you are going to be doing with the data once it gets coming to us?
Alright. We run communications with the satellite in two different ways. All the spacecraft control is run by our partner CNES,
with the French Space Agency. That's run out of Toulouse, France. The science data will come down through a separate downlink to the U.S.
and be transferred to a data archival center at the NASA Langley Research Center.
There it will be processed and made available basically as soon as it's on the data system,
available for general public to get to and also our other partners.
Very good. And again, we're at T-42 minutes and counting and the rocket, the vehicle itself,
is experiencing no problems. And tell us, is the spacecraft doing well?
The spacecraft is doing well. Everything is looking good. Everything is healthy.
Good.
All the parameters that we monitor as our criteria for launch are within limits and so we're still ready to go.
Well, I know we've got a lot of work to do still, so good luck to you and your team.
Thank you.