This mission was the 82nd flight of the Atlas V and the sixth of its 411 configuration. The launch vehicle tasked with sending Solar Orbiter on its way to Venus was the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket flying and its 411 configuration. Those Eastern Range systems and antennas were then powered off so they did not interfere with Antares’ ability to communicate with the Bermuda tracking station during its launch.Īll of the Eastern Range assets for flight termination of the Atlas V would have then been reactivated and reverified had Antares successfully launched. See AlsoĪhead of the Cygnus standdown, the doubleheader launch campaign off the east coast of the United States marked a very rare occurrence of such an event and saw both the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport and the 45th Eastern Range in Florida work together to ensure both missions could launch.įor the Eastern Range in Florida, this included advancing some frequency and communication checks between Range assets and the Atlas V’s flight termination system. However, the Antares launch was scrubbed. Launch of Solar Orbiter was scheduled to occur just 5 hours 24 minutes after Northrop Grumman launched their Antares 230+ rocket with the NG-13 Cygnus cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The probe launched atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 411 rocket from SLC-41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, at the start of a 2-hour launch window that opens at 23:03 EST Sunday evening (04:03 UTC Monday morning).ĭuring the two-hour launch window, there were 25 single-second instantaneous opportunities - one every 5 minutes - in which Atlas V could launch owing to the ever-changing trajectories needed to insert Solar Orbiter into an interplanetary transfer heliocentric orbit to Venus. A mission years in the planning and building took its next great leap Sunday evening as the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter blasts off on a 7-year mission to study the Sun.
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