Arizona Daily Star, The (AZ)

Tucson, AZ

July 27, 2006

ICBM fails to put UA satellites in orbit

Author: Dan Sorenson, ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Two tiny satellites, representing roughly six years of work by a University of Arizona student team, were aboard a converted Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile that malfunctioned and crashed Wednesday.

But there was no spectacular video or even an audio pronouncement of destruction from the distant control room when the former nuclear warhead vehicle failed to deliver 14 student satellites from universities in the U.S., Japan, and Korea into orbit.

It was approaching 12:43 p.m. in a lecture hall on the third floor of the UA’s Kuiper Space Sciences Building, converted to a remote mission monitoring room, as students and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory faculty and staffers watched a grainy green big-screen image with points of light stretched across the bottom.

On the far side of the world, it was near midnight and pitch black except for those lights, at the Baikonur Base, Kazakhstan, where the launch was being handled by the Russian military.

Those gathered at the UA had already heard from a Cal Poly student crew, translating the Russian control room audio, that the lid on the former ICBM silo had been lifted and secured.

Then the familiar countdown was heard in unfamiliar Russian and youthful English, ending in “liftoff.” And, due to Internet delay, a few seconds later they could see flames erupting from the ground, lighting up the night thousands of miles away. A dagger of brilliant white flame lifted away from the ground. The body of the rocket could not be seen. A cheer went up.

But there was scant information, other than occasional reports that all information was within normal range.

Within a minute, there was no video.

There was none of the mission control narration, interrupted by those beeps, that U.S. space program listeners are used to hearing.

Reports of failure started to trickle in, and the crowd started to trickle out of the room.

Some ignored, or seemed immune to, the mounting bad news that the two 4-inch-square “cube sats,” Rincon and Sacred, were lost. One was sponsored by Rincon Research, a local company, and was to broadcast extremely low-power signals—less than a hundredth of the power put out by a cell phone—from 300 miles up. Sacred, sponsored in part by Alcatel, was to measure the effect of long-term radiation on communication satellite circuitry.

Uwe Fink, LPL professor emeritus and the leader of the project, said only three of the many students who worked on the program since it began in 2000 were still around. The rest, he said proudly, had been “snapped up” by the aerospace industry.

“We don't know how good or how bad it will be,” said Chuck Green, a retired IBM engineer and consultant with the amateur satellite group Amsat.

“It may be that we just lost telemetry,” said Ron Fevig, a UA grad student and CubeSat team member.

“It could be ours was one of the first released,” said Ben Pearson, a 22-year-old undergrad team member.

Pearson said he was hooked on the UA’s space program when he came for a visit while a high-school junior in Casa Grande.

But by 2:30 p.m. Arizona time, the BBC was declaring the launch a failure, with all satellites destroyed just minutes after liftoff.

“The program has certainly been a success even if the launch was a failure,” said Fevig.

To Fevig, launch failures are a setback, not total defeat. He recalled watching the first space-shuttle launch as a child.

“I've been a space cadet all my life,” he said.

Online info:

* www.lpl.arizona.edu

* www.amsat.org

* www.cubesat.org

Contact reporter Dan Sorenson at 573-4185 or dsorenson@azstarnet.com

Copyright 2006 The Arizona Daily Star
Record Number: MERLIN_4445862