RSS
Home
Space shuttle launch to light up America's Eastern seaboard: how to watch
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
A nearly-full moon Tuesday night spotlighted space shuttle Discovery, scheduled to lift off at 9:20 p.m. EDT tonight on a mission to the space station. Sky watchers all along the Eastern coast will have a rare chance to watch Discovery and the STS-119 crew roar into space against a night sky.
Discovery will appear low in the sky, at about 5 to 15 degrees above the horizon, depending on your viewing point. It will be moving fast, streaking across 90 degrees of azimuth in less than a minute. If your weather is good, you might be able to catch the major milestones in the flight.
Those key events include solid rocket booster (SRB) separation and ejection and the separation of the external tank. The latter will occur about 430 miles southeast of New York City at eight minutes and 23 seconds after launch.
Get your cameras ready! If you get a good picture or video of the launch from your hometown, email me at spacenewsexaminer@hotmail.com I'll be publishing reader photos and experiences.
Onboard Discovery: Commander Lee Archambault, Pilot Tony Antonelli, and Mission Specialists Joseph Acaba, John Phillips, Steve Swanson, Richard Arnold and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata. They're scheduled to leave Kennedy Space Center's Operations & Checkout (O&C) Building at 5:30 p.m. as they head to the launch pad.
The STS-119 crew has a busy schedule ahead, including four spacewalks. They're carrying up the final truss segment that will complete the International Space Station's backbone, along with the final set of solar arrays.
The solar arrays provide power to the space station. The extra power not only will support science experiments, but also provide more juice when the population of the space station increases to six from three.
The Discovery crew and Expedition 18 members already onboard the space station will perform repair work on the pesky recycler designed to convert urine to usuable water. When Discovery comes home, they'll bring along astronaut Sandy Magnus, who flew to the station in November on Space Shuttle Endeavour on the STS-126 mission. Wakata will remain aboard the space station.
Engineers and pad workers overcame a troubling problem with main propulsion system vvalves that caused a delay of several weeks. Extensive additional testing convinced wary managers that Discovery was ready to fly after a slightly-less-used set of valves was installed on the launch pad.
You can watch the launch live on NASA TV, Spacevidcast (where there's always a lively chat room of space fans to share the experience with), at Spaceflight Now (with Miles O'Brien, David Waters & former astronaut Leroy Chiao), or KSC hometown newspaper Florida Today. I'm currently battling pneumonia, so I'm not sure if I'll watch on my TV on the NASA Channel or online (or both). If I'm up to it, you can find me at Spacevidcast chatting with Cariann and Ben Higginbotham and other space fans.
Image credit/NASA, Bill Ingalls
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
