U.S. Polar-orbiting Weather Satellite Soon Headed to Vandenberg for October launch

摘要

The first of the United States' next generation of civil polar-orbiting weather satellites is to be trucked from Colorado to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Aug. 29 in preparation for a late-October launch, government and industry officials said. The trip will take "a little over a day" to complete, said Scott Tennant, program manager for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) at Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Boulder, Colo. Ball built the NPP spacecraft platform as well as the satellite's Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite instrument. Liftoff is slated for Oct. 25 aboard what could be the last launch of a Delta 2 rocket, which United Launch Alliance began phasing out several years ago as the U.S. Air Force and NASA transitioned more and more payloads to the Denver-based company's bigger rockets.