Our December meeting featured an excellent presentation on NASA Launch Weather Forecasting by local NASA Solar System Ambassador, Tony Rice. Astronomers obviously need clear night skies to get anything done and spend a lot of time studying weather forecasts of frontal boundaries, cloud cover, winds aloft and airmass moisture. To send a space mission on its way, NASA does all that and much more. Tony walked us through other weather factors that govern a launch such as temperature, lightening risk and where winds will carry debris and toxic materials in event of a disaster.
Tony Rice
We learned that NASA launch criteria has evolved since the Apollo program in the 1960’s and is very vehicle and mission specific. Some spacecraft, such as the Shuttle with its delicate re-entry tiles, are more fragile vehicles and need more favorable conditions for a launch. Other vehicles are less tolerant of upper atmosphere winds during launch.
During the Apollo program, NASA met all of its launch dates but used more relaxed weather criteria for launch. This resulted in a near mission abort with Apollo 12 as the rocket was struck by lightening shortly after launch. As a result, launch sites such as Cape Canaveral have many detectors that measure electrical charge in the atmosphere and are used to assess lightning risk.
In the case of Apollo 12, the vehicle itself induced the lightening strike. It just so happens that a 300 foot long metal rocket trailing hot ionized gas makes a great lightening rod. Tony also covered the kind of temperature conditions that resulted in the tragic loss of Space Shuttle Challenger and its crew back in the 1980s. The club enjoyed Tony’s talk and had a lot of great questions.
A recording of the December meeting is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLSeyW9mjis
