Swift Launch Delayed

Wednesday, 17 November—It is 2 in the morning, and two NASA guys just knocked on the door of the newsroom at the Kennedy Space Center to tell me that the mission has been scrubbed. They said there was a problem with the telemetry. At about 1:30 a.m., the protective walls around the rocket were scheduled to be rolled away from the launch pad, so I guess that is when the problem was discovered. Rats. Everything had been going so smoothly.

Earlier yesterday afternoon, you could feel and hear the emotional electricity here at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where scientists, students, engineers and their families gathered for a celebration before NASA launches its newest astronomy satellite. The celebration is about their triumphant achievement of having moved the innovative “Swift” space observatory from their imaginations to the launch pad in only five years. The electricity is about their hopes and fears for the launch. If all goes well, Swift will be hurtled into space at speeds nine times faster than a speeding bullet and 20 times faster than the speed of sound.

John Nousek is at Cape Canaveral to observe the launch with about eight other members of Swift's Penn State team. Most team members who have responsibilities for flight operations are back at University Park, preparing to take control of the observatory as soon as it separates from its booster rocket.

“We did the final check-out of the instruments four days ago, so now the mission is completely in the hands of the launch team for a while,” said Nousek, who is enjoying a rare break since he began working on the proposal for Swift with Neil Gehrels, now Swift's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA selected Swift to be funded over about 30 competing proposals for other types of space observatories.

“Before I left University Park, I reminded the Penn State flight operations team of the importance of staying calm and reacting efficiently, no matter what happens,” Nousek said. While Nousek is in Florida, Margaret Chester, the leader for ground operations, and Thomas Taylor, the program manager for Swift at Penn State, will take turns leading the flight-operations team at the Mission Operations Center. “We have trained to handle surprises and to solve unanticipated problems, so if surprises happen we are ready to handle them,” Chester said.

Among the scientific surprises Swift is expected to deliver are clues about the origin of gamma-ray bursts, which occur about once a day in unpredictable locations in the sky and are the most powerful explosions ever observed in the universe. Swift is the first NASA observatory with multiple powerful telescopes for detecting radiation in more than one wavelength—an innovation that will help scientists pinpoint the location of the massive explosions in both space and time to learn how far they are from Earth.

“Everyone on this international team is sharing the same hope right now—that the launch will be successful and the mission will be successful,” said Joanne Hill, a Penn State scientist who works on the software that helps Swift's X-ray telescope work well with the other parts of the observatory, including the telescopes that detect ultraviolet, optical, and gamma rays. Swift's lead partners include nine scientific institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy. “Our hopes are high for a successful launch, but we know there are no guarantees in this business,” Hill said.

Once the excitement of the launch is over, the excitement of scientific discovery can begin. Over the next month or two the Penn State team at the Mission Operations Center will be working in shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, bringing Swift's systems up to full operation.