Gamma Ray Bursts May Propel Fast Moving Particles

Image credit: NASA

Astronomers believe that gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the Universe, may be generating ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, the most energetic particles in the Universe. These cosmic rays have baffled astronomers because they’re moving faster than if they were thrown out of a supernova. Evidence gathered by NASA’s de-orbited Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory showed that in one instance of a gamma ray burst, these high-energy particles dominated the area giving a connection between them, but this is hardly enough evidence to say they’re conclusively linked.

The most powerful explosions in the universe, gamma-ray bursts, may generate the most energetic particles in the universe, known as the ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs), according to a new analysis of observations from NASA’s Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory.

Researchers report in the August 14 edition of Nature of a newly identified pattern in the light from these enigmatic bursts that could be explained by protons moving within a hair’s breadth of light speed.

These protons, like shrapnel from an explosion, could be UHECRs. Such cosmic rays are rare and constitute an enduring mystery in astrophysics, seemingly defying physical explanation, for they are simply far too energetic to have been generated by well-known mechanisms such as supernova explosions.

“Cosmic rays ‘forget’ where they come from because, unlike light, they are whipped about in space by magnetic fields,” said lead author Maria Magdalena Gonzalez of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. “This result is an exciting chance to possibly see evidence of them being produced at their source.”

Gamma-ray bursts — a mystery scientists are finally beginning to unravel — can shine as brilliantly as a million trillion suns, and many may be from an unusually powerful type of exploding star. The bursts are common yet random and fleeting, lasting only seconds.

Cosmic rays are atomic particles (for example, electrons, protons or neutrinos) moving close to light speed. Lower-energy cosmic rays bombard the Earth constantly, propelled by solar flares and typical star explosions. UHECRs, with each atomic particle carrying the energy of a baseball thrown in the Major Leagues, are a hundred-million times more energetic than the particles produced in the largest human-made particle accelerators.

Scientists say the UHECRs must be generated relatively close to the Earth, for any particle traveling farther than 100 million light years would lose some of its energy by the time it reached us. Yet no local source of ordinary cosmic rays seems powerful enough to generate a UHECR.

The Gonzalez-led paper focuses not specifically on UHECR production but rather a new pattern of light seen in a gamma-ray burst. Digging deep into the Compton Observatory archives (the mission ended in 2000), the group found that a gamma-ray burst from 1994, named GRB941017, appears different from the other 2,700-some bursts recorded by this spacecraft. This burst was located in the direction of the constellation Sagitta, the Arrow, likely ten billion light years away.

What scientists call gamma rays are photons (light particles) covering a wide range of energies, in fact, over a million times wider than the energies our eyes register as the colors in a rainbow. Gonzalez’s group looked at the higher-energy gamma-ray photons. The scientists found that these types of photons dominated the burst: They were at least three times more powerful on average than the lower-energy component yet, surprisingly, thousands of times more powerful after about 100 seconds.

That is, while the flow of lower-energy photons hitting the satellite’s detectors began to ease, the flow of higher-energy photons remained steady. The finding is inconsistent with the popular “synchrotron shock model” describing most bursts. So what could explain this enrichment of higher-energy photons?

“One explanation is that ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are responsible, but exactly how they create the gamma rays with the energy patterns we saw needs a lot of calculating,” said Dr. Brenda Dingus of LANL, a co-author on the paper. “We’ll be keeping some theorists busy trying to figure this out.”

A delayed injection of ultrahigh-energy electrons provides another way to explain the unexpectedly large high-energy gamma-ray flow observed in GRB 941017. But this explanation would require a revision of the standard burst model, said co-author Dr. Charles Dermer, a theoretical astrophysicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. “In either case, this result reveals a new process occurring in gamma-ray bursts,” he said.

Gamma-ray bursts have not been detected originating within 100 million light years from Earth, but through the eons these types of explosions may have occurred locally. If so, Dingus said, the mechanism her group saw in GRB 941017 could have been duplicated close to home, close enough to supply the UHECRs we see today.

Other bursts in the Compton Observatory archive may have exhibited a similar pattern, but the data are not conclusive. NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), scheduled for launch in 2006, will have detectors powerful enough to resolve higher-energy gamma-ray photons and solve this mystery.

Co-authors on the Nature report also include Ph.D. graduate student Yuki Kaneko, Dr. Robert Preece, and Dr. Michael Briggs of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. This research was funded by NASA and the Office of Naval Research.

UHECRs are observed when they crash into our atmosphere, as is illustrated in the figure. The energy from the collision produces an air shower of billions of subatomic particles and flashes of ultraviolet light, which are detected by special instruments.

The National Science Foundation and international collaborators have sponsored instruments on the ground, such as the High Resolution Fly’s Eye in Utah (http://www.cosmic-ray.org/learn.html) and the Auger Observatory in Argentina (http://www.auger.org/). In addition, NASA is working with the European Space Agency to place the Extreme Universe Space Observatory (http://aquila.lbl.gov/EUSO/) on the International Space Station. The proposed OWL mission would, from orbit, look downward towards air showers, viewing a region as large as Texas.

These scientists record the flashes and take a census of the subatomic shrapnel, working backward to calculate how much energy a single particle needs to make the atmospheric cascade. They arrive at a shocking figure of 10^20 electron volts (eV) or more. (For comparison, the energy in a particle of yellow light is 2 eV, and the electrons in your television tube are in the thousand electron volt energy range.)

These ultrahigh-energy particles experience the bizarre effects predicted by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. If we could observe them coming from a remote corner of the cosmos, say a hundred million light years away, we’d have to be patient — it will take a hundred million years to complete the journey. However, if we could travel with the particles, the trip is over in less than a day due to the dilation of time of rapidly moving objects as measured by an observer.

The highest energy cosmic rays cannot even reach us if produced from distant sources, because they collide and lose energy with the cosmic microwave photons left over from the big bang. Sources of these cosmic rays must be found relatively close to us, at a distance of several hundred million light years. Stars that explode as gamma-ray bursts are found within this distance, so intensive observational efforts are underway to find gamma-ray burst remnants distinguished by radiation halos made by the cosmic rays.

Few kinds of celestial objects possess the extreme conditions required to blast particles to UHECR speeds. If gamma-ray bursts produce UHECRs, they probably do so by accelerating particles in jets of matter ejected from the explosion at close to the speed of light. Gamma-ray bursts have the power to accelerate UHECRs, but the gamma-ray bursts observed so far have been remote, billions of light years away. This doesn’t mean they can’t happen nearby, within the UHECR cutoff distance.

A leading contender for long-lived kinds of gamma-ray bursts like GRB941017 is the supernova/collapsar model. Supernovae happen when a star many times more massive than the Sun exhausts its fuel, causing its core to collapse under its own gravity while its outer layers are blown off in an immense thermonuclear explosion. Collapsars are a special type of supernova where the core is so massive it collapses into a black hole, an object so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravity within the black hole’s event horizon. However, observations indicate black holes are sloppy eaters, ejecting material that passes near, but does not cross, their event horizons.

In a collapsar, the star’s core forms a disk of material around the newly formed black hole, like water swirling around a drain. The black hole consumes most of the disk, but some matter is blasted in jets from the poles of the black hole. The jets tear through the collapsing star at close to the speed of light, and then punch through gas surrounding the doomed star. As the jets crash into the interstellar medium, they create shock waves and slow down. Internal shocks also form in the jets as their leading edges slow and are slammed from behind by a stream of high-speed matter. The shocks accelerate particles that generate gamma rays; they could also accelerate particles to UHECR speeds, according to the team.

“It’s like bouncing a ping pong ball between a paddle and a table,” said Dingus. “As you move the paddle closer to the table, the ball bounces faster and faster. In a gamma-ray burst, the paddle and the table are shells ejected in the jet. Turbulent magnetic fields force the particles to ricochet between the shells, accelerating them to almost the speed of light before they break free as UHECRs.”

Detection of neutrinos from gamma-ray bursts would clinch the case for cosmic ray acceleration by gamma-ray bursts. Neutrinos are elusive particles made when high-energy protons collide with photons. Neutrinos have no electrical charge, so still point back to the direction of their source.

The National Science Foundation is currently building IceCube (http://icecube.wisc.edu/), a cubic kilometer detector located in the ice under the South Pole, to search for neutrino emission from gamma-ray bursts. However, the characteristics of nature’s highest-energy particle accelerators remain an enduring mystery, though acceleration by the exploding stars that make gamma-ray bursts has been in favor ever since Mario Vietri (Universita di Roma) and Eli Waxman (Weizmann Institute) proposed it in 1995.

The team believes that while other explanations are possible for this observation, the result is consistent with UHECR acceleration in gamma-ray bursts. They saw both low-energy and high-energy gamma rays in the GRB941017 explosion. The low-energy gamma rays are what scientists expect from high-speed electrons being deflected by intense magnetic fields, while the high-energy rays are what’s expected if some of the UHECRs produced in the burst crash into other photons, creating a shower of particles, some of which flash to produce the high-energy gamma rays when they decay.

The timing of the gamma-ray emission is also significant. The low-energy gamma rays faded away relatively quickly, while the high-energy gamma rays lingered. This makes sense if two different classes of particles – electrons and the protons of the UHECRs – are responsible for the different gamma rays. “It’s much easier for electrons than protons to radiate their energy. Therefore, the emission of low-energy gamma rays from electrons would be shorter than the high-energy gamma rays from the protons,” said Dingus.

The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory was the second of NASA’s Great Observatories and the gamma-ray equivalent to the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Compton was launched aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis in April 1991, and at 17 tons, was the largest astrophysical payload ever flown at that time. At the end of its pioneering mission, Compton was deorbited and re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on June 4, 2000.

Original Source: NASA News Release

SCISAT Successfully Launched

Image credit: NASA

The Canadian Space Agency’s SCISAT satellite was successfully launched Wednesday morning on board a Pegasus XL rocket. The L-1011 carrier aircraft deployed the three-stage Pegasus rocket at 0210 GMT (22:10 EDT Tuesday) at 12,000 metres, which then blasted up to a 650 km polar orbit. During its two-year mission, SCISAT will help a team of international scientists improve their understanding of ozone layer depletion – especially over Canada and the Arctic.

SAINT-HUBERT, Aug. 13 /CNW Telbec/ – The Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
today confirmed the successful launch of its SCISAT satellite last night from
NASA’s launch facilities near Lompoc, California. During its two-year mission,
SCISAT will help a team of Canadian and international scientists improve their
understanding of the depletion of the ozone layer, with a special emphasis on
the changes occurring over Canada and in the Arctic.

“This leading-edge Canadian technology will improve our scientific
understanding of the complex chemical changes occurring in the upper
atmosphere, particularly in the far north”, said Mr. Allan Rock, Minister of
Industry.” The SCISAT mission illustrates how Canadian universities,
government and industry can work together to put innovative technologies at
the service of scientific research,” added Minister Rock.

SCISAT was launched yesterday at 19:10 PDT, approximately 160 km offshore
from the Vandenberg Air Force Base. The 150 kg satellite was packed in the
nose of a Pegasus XL rocket dropped at 40,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean from
a Lockeed-1011 aircraft. The satellite was successfully brought to its 650 km-
high polar orbit by the 3-stage Pegasus rocket.

“SCISAT sets a milestone in Canadian space science,” said Marc Garneau,
President of the CSA. “Following the MOST space telescope launched in June,
SCISAT is the second science satellite successfully placed in orbit by Canada
in the last 45 days. This illustrates the growing importance of space science
for Canada and for the Canadian Space Program.”

A scientific team of researchers from around the world, lead by Professor
Peter Bernath of the University of Waterloo, will participate in the
Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE) which aims to measure and understand
the chemical processes that control the distribution of ozone in the Earth’s
atmosphere, particularly at high latitudes. The data, recorded as SCISAT
orbits the Earth, will provide scientists with improved measurements relating
to global ozone processes. It will also help policy makers assess existing
environmental policy and develop protective measures for improving the health
of our atmosphere and preventing further ozone depletion.

The primary scientific instrument on board SCISAT is a Fourier Transform
Spectrometer (ACE-FTS), built by ABB of Qu?bec City. A second instrument named
MAESTRO (Measurements of Aerosol Extinction in the Stratosphere and
Troposphere Retrieved by Occultation), built by EMS Technologies of Ottawa,
will also fly on the satellite. Dr. Tom McElroy of Environment Canada is the
principal investigator for MAESTRO, and will be supported by Professor James
Drummond of the University of Toronto.

For more background information on the SCISAT mission, please visit the
CSA website at: http://www.space.gc.ca/scisat1

Original Source: CSA News Release

Free Sky Maps Updated Monthly

With Mars approaching, people have been a lot more interested in getting to know their night sky. One of the best resources for this is a website called Skymaps.com. It offers a free map of the night sky from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres which you can download and print off each month. It also has a calendar of astronomy-related events happening for the month and a list of objects which are visible with the naked eye/binoculars/telescope. The best thing to do is sign up for the monthly newsletter so you’re notified as soon as a new map is ready.

Great site.

Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today

Amateur Spots a Gamma Ray Burst Afterglow

Image credit: NASA

Berto Monard, an amateur astronomer from South Africa was lucky enough to spot the afterglow from a powerful gamma-ray burst – beating professional astronomers to the target. The 40-second-long burst was discovered by NASA’s HETE spacecraft, which provided Monard rough coordinates of where to look. He was able to provide the astronomy community with a precise location so they can follow up days or weeks later to try and determine what actually caused the explosion.

Armed with a 12-inch telescope, a computer, and a NASA email alert, Berto Monard of South Africa has become the first amateur astronomer to discover an afterglow of a gamma-ray burst, the most powerful explosion known in the Universe.

The discovery highlights the ease in tapping into NASA’s burst alert system, as well as the increasing importance that astronomy enthusiasts play in helping scientists understand fleeting and random events, such as star explosions and gamma-ray bursts.

This 40-second-long burst was detected by NASA’s High-Energy Transient Explorer (HETE) on July 25. Monard’s positioning of the lingering afterglow, and thus burst location, has given way to precision follow-up study, an opportunity that very well might have been missed: At the time of the burst, thousands of professional astronomers were attending the International Astronomical Union conference in Sydney, Australia, far away from their observatories.

“I have seen a multitude of stars and galaxies and even supernovae, but this gamma-ray burst afterglow is among the most ancient light that has ever graced my telescope,” Monard said. “The explosion that caused this likely occurred billions of years ago, before the Earth was formed.”

Gamma-ray bursts, many of which now appear to be massive star explosions billions of light years away, only last for a few milliseconds to upwards of a minute. Prompt identification of an afterglow, which can last for hours to days in lower-energy light such as X ray and optical, is crucial for piecing together the explosion that caused the burst.

Monard notified the pros of the burst location within seven hours of the HETE detection. The Interplanetary Network (IPN), comprising six orbiting gamma-ray detectors, confirmed the location shortly thereafter.

Because of the nature of gamma-ray light, which cannot be focused like optical light, HETE locates bursts to only within a few arcminutes. (An arcminute is about the size of an eye of a needle held at arm’s length.) Most gamma-ray bursts are exceedingly far, so myriad stars and galaxies fill that tiny circle. Without prompt localization of a bright and fading afterglow, scientists have great difficulty locating the gamma-ray burst
location days or weeks later.

The study of gamma-ray bursts (and increasing ease of amateur participation) comes through two innovations: faster burst detectors like HETE and a near-instant information relay system called the Gamma-ray Burst Coordinates Network, or GCN, which is located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The typical pattern follows: HETE detects a burst and, within a few seconds to about a minute, relays a location to the GCN. Instantly, the automated GCN notifies scientists and amateur astronomers worldwide about the burst event via email, pagers, and a Web site.

Monard is a member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). This organization operates the AAVSO International High Energy Network, which acts as a liaison between the amateur and the professional communities. Monard essentially used GCN information passed through the AAVSO and other network groups and turned his telescope to the location determined by HETE.

“In the past two years, HETE has opened the door wide for rapid follow-up studies by professional astronomers,” said HETE Principal Investigator George Ricker of MIT. “Now, with GRB030725, the worldwide community of dedicated and expert amateur astronomers coordinated through the AAVSO is leaping through that door to join the fun.”

Monard, a Belgian national living in South Africa, has other discoveries under his belt, including ten supernovae and several outbursts from neutron star systems, as part of his participation with the worldwide Center for Backyard Astrophysics network and the Variable Star Network.

The AAVSO, founded in 1911, is a non-profit, scientific organization with members in 46 countries. It coordinates, compiles, digitizes and disseminates observations on stars that change in brightness (variable stars) to researchers and educators worldwide. Its International High Energy Network was created with cooperation from NASA.

HETE was built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under NASA’s Explorer Program. HETE is a collaboration among NASA, MIT, Los Alamos National Laboratory; France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements, and Ecole Nationale Superieure de l’Aeronautique et de l’Espace; and Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN). The science team includes members from the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz) and the University of Chicago, as well as from Brazil, India and Italy.

Formation of Stars is On the Decline

Image credit: SDSS

The age of star formation in the Universe is drawing to a close, according to a new report from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A team of astronomers analyzed the colour of an enormous number of nearby galaxies and found that they contained less young stars than more distant galaxies. Since light takes so long to travel, the more distant galaxies are seen as they appeared many billion years ago. The number of new stars being formed has been on the decline since about 6 billon years ago, when our own Sun formed.

The universe is gently fading into darkness according to three astronomers who have looked at 40,000 galaxies in the neighbourhood of the Milky Way. Research student Ben Panter and Professor Alan Heavens from Edinburgh University’s Institute for Astronomy, and Professor Raul Jimenez of University of Pennsylvania, USA, decoded the “fossil record” concealed in the starlight from the galaxies to build up a detailed account of how many young, recently-formed stars there were at different periods in the 14-billion-year existence of the universe. Their history shows that, for billions of years, there have not been enough new stars turning on to replace all the old stars that die and switch off. The results will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on 21 August 2003.

“Our analysis confirms that the age of star formation is drawing to a close”, says Alan Heavens. “The number of new stars being formed in the huge sample of galaxies we studied has been in decline for around 6 billion years – roughly since the time our own Sun came into being.”

Astronomers already had evidence that this was the case, mainly from observing galaxies so far away that we see them as they were billions of years ago because of the great length of time their light has taken to reach us. Now the same story emerges strongly from the work of Panter, Heavens and Jimenez, who for the first time approached the problem differently and used the whole spectrum of light from an enormous number of nearby galaxies to get a more complete picture.

Galaxies shine with the combined light of all the stars in them. Most of the light from young stars is blue, coming from very hot massive stars. These blue stars live fast and die young, ending their lives in supernova explosions. When they have gone, they no longer outshine the smaller red stars that are more long-lived. Many galaxies look reddish overall rather than blue – a broad sign that most star formation happened long ago.

In their analysis, Panter, Heavens and Jimenez have used far more than the simple overall colours of the galaxies, though. The spectrum observations they used come from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the volume of data involved was so vast, that the researchers had to develop a special lossless data compression method, called MOPED, to allow them to analyse the sample in a reasonable length of time, without losing accuracy.

Original Source: RAS News Release

SCISAT Ready for Launch Tuesday

Image credit: CSA

Everything is ready to go for the launch of the Canadian Space Agency’s Scientific Satellite Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (SCISAT-1) on board a Pegasus XL rocket on Wednesday, August 13. If it all goes as planned, the L-1011 aircraft will carry the Pegasus rocket over the Pacific Ocean, and release it at 0210 GMT (10:10 pm EDT Tuesday) to carry SCISAT into orbit. SCISAT will help scientists track the chemical processes that control the distribution of ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Canadian Space Agency’s Scientific Satellite Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (SCISAT-1) is scheduled to launch on Tuesday, August 12, between 10:05 and 11:02 p.m. EDT.

An L-1011 jet aircraft departing from Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), Calif., will carry the Pegasus XL vehicle that will launch SCISAT-1. The L-1011 will drop the Pegasus, and its 330-pound spacecraft, over the Pacific Ocean at approximately 10:10 p.m. EDT. The SCISAT-1 mission will provide scientists with improved measurements of the chemical processes that control the distribution of ozone in Earth’s atmosphere.

The pre-launch press conference is at the NASA Resident Office at VAFB, Monday, August 11, at 4 p.m. EDT. The press conference will be carried live on NASA TV with question and answer capability available from NASA Headquarters; KSC; and Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

On launch day, media should meet at the VAFB main gate at 8:30 p.m. EDT to be escorted to the runway for the L-1011 take-off. Media may follow the release and launch of Pegasus/SCISAT from the viewing room of the NASA Mission Director’s Center, Building 840 on South VAFB.

Assuming a nominal flight of the Pegasus launch vehicle, a post-launch news conference will not be held. However, launch vehicle and spacecraft representatives will be available afterward to informally answer questions from the media.

Launch coverage on NASA Television begins at 8:30 p.m. EDT through spacecraft separation from the Pegasus vehicle. NASA TV is broadcast on AMC-9, Transponder 9C, C-band, located at 85 degrees west longitude. The frequency is 3880.0 MHz. Polarization is vertical, and audio is monaural at 6.80 MHz. Live launch commentary and audio of the Pegasus/SCISAT briefing will be available on the “V” audio circuits available at: 321/867-1220/1240/1260/7135.

The Pegasus/SCISAT News Center at the NASA VAFB Resident Office will be staffed starting on Monday from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. EDT; phone: 805/605-3051/3001. A recorded status report is available at: 805/734-2693.

Click the “Watch NASA TV Now!” link for live Web cast at:

http://www.nasa.gov

NASA’s Earth Science Enterprise sponsors the mission and is responsible for countdown and launch management. Orbital Sciences Corp. will provide the launch service, and the Canadian Space Agency is responsible for spacecraft development.

Original Source: NASA News Release

SpaceShipOne Completes First Drop Test

Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne completed its first glide test on Thursday, after it was released from the White Knight aircraft at an altitude of 14,300 metres. The X-Prize candidate was taken through a series of tests in the air, and then landed at a runway in the Mojave desert. Since it was unveiled in April, 2003, SpaceShipOne is considered one of the front runners to win the $10 million X-Prize for the first privately-built spacecraft to reach an altitude of 100 km twice within 2 weeks.

Cosmonaut Ties the Knot From Space

Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko married his fianc?, Ekaterina Dmitriev, on Sunday, but it wasn’t a normal ceremony. Dimitriev was in Houston while Malenchenko hurtled 385 kilometres above on the International Space Station. The couple took advantage of Texas law, which allows weddings to take place even if one person isn’t present. The Russian Aerospace Agency tried to block the wedding in the beginning, but eventually backed down, and gave the couple their blessing.

Hubble Sees One Galaxy Consuming Another

A new image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a large galaxy gobbling up a smaller one; a process anticipated by astronomers, but never directly seen before. Astronomers used the Keck Telescope in Hawaii to confirm that the dwarf galaxy is being consumed by measuring the rate that stars are streaming towards the larger galaxy. The stars of the smaller galaxy will eventually form a spherical halo surrounding the flattened disk of the larger galaxy.

Sea Launch Lofts Echostar IX/Telstar 13

Image credit: Sea Launch

The dual-use Echostar IX/Telstar 13 satellite was successfully placed into orbit Thursday on board a Zenit-3SL which was launched from the Sea Launch platform floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The communications satellite separated 66 minutes after launch, and will eventually provide television services to the United States. This is the tenth launch for Sea Launch, which is expected to have two more launches this year.

Sea Launch, the world?s most reliable launch service provider for heavy commercial communication satellites, today successfully launched the EchoStar IX/Telstar 13 satellite to orbit for EchoStar Communications Corporation and Loral Skynet.

A Zenit-3SL launch vehicle lifted off at 8:31 pm PDT (3:31 GMT) from the Odyssey Launch Platform positioned at 154 degrees West Longitude, on the Equator. All systems performed nominally throughout the flight. The Block DM-SL upper stage inserted the 4,737 kg (10,443 lb) EchoStar IX/Telstar 13 satellite into a high perigee geosynchronous transfer orbit. As planned, the spacecraft?s first signal was acquired at 9:46 pm PDT (4:46 GMT), shortly after spacecraft separation, by a ground station in Western Australia. The spacecraft will be located in geostationary orbit at 121 degrees West Longitude.

Upon completion of the successful mission, Jim Maser, president and general manager of Sea Launch, said, ?I want to congratulate Space Systems/Loral (SS/L), EchoStar Communications Corporation, Loral Skynet and the entire Sea Launch team for a great job! Once again, we achieved a very smooth operation. This is clearly a tribute to the skill, dedication and experience of everyone in the Sea Launch organization and I am very proud to be part of this talented group. We have just completed our second launch in less than two months and we expect to continue this tempo well through next year.

?This mission also marked our tenth launch and the first for SS/L,? Maser continued. ?We appreciate the confidence and trust they and their customers have demonstrated and we look forward to the many more SS/L launches on our manifest. We also welcome the opportunity to serve EchoStar and Loral Skynet in the future.?

SS/L built the EchoStar IX/Telstar 13 spacecraft in Palo Alto, Calif. The Ku-band capacity will enhance EchoStar?s U.S. DISH Network satellite television service. EchoStar has also equipped the spacecraft with the first commercial Ka-band spot-beam payload in the United States. In addition, in a unique multi-band, satellite-sharing arrangement, Loral Skynet will own and operate the satellite?s C-band capacity, as Telstar 13, which will provide television programmers with North American coverage.

Sea Launch Company, LLC, headquartered in Long Beach, Calif., is a world leader in providing heavy-lift commercial launch services. This multinational partnership offers the most direct and cost-effective route to geostationary orbit. With the advantage of a launch site on the Equator, the reliable Zenit-3SL rocket can lift a heavier spacecraft mass or provide longer life on orbit, offering best value plus schedule assurance. Sea Launch has a current backlog of 14 firm launch contracts. For additional information and images of this successfully completed mission, visit the Sea Launch website at: www.sea-launch.com

Original Source: Sea Launch