Posted on by Fraser Cain

Perseid Meteor Shower Next Week

Image credit: ESA

The annual Perseid meteor shower is due to make its appearance in mid-August this summer. The shower began on July 23 and will end on August 22, but the bulk of shooting stars will appear on August 13, when upwards of one meteor per minute is visible in the night sky. Unfortunately, the full Moon will brighten the sky and make some of the fainter meteors harder to see. To get the best view of the Perseids, get away from the city lights to a place which is as flat as possible to give you a wide view of the sky.

A fantastic, free light show occurred in the morning of Wednesday, 13 August 2003, in the form of the Perseid meteor shower!

This impressive set of shooting stars appears in the skies every year from around 23 July to 22 August, with its peak on 13 August. First recorded as long ago as 36 AD, the Perseids are also known as ‘the tears of St. Lawrence’ after the Roman martyr.

Typically, you can see this phenomenon with the naked eye, with a shooting star appearing every minute until about 03.00 CET on Wednesday morning. You may also see meteors a few days before or after this time.

However, this year the Moon will be full near the Perseid’s maximum, which will reduce observed rates by a factor of three or so. It will not be until around 2007 when the Moon’s phase is more favourable than that of last year.

Meteor showers occur when the Earth passes through the trail of debris often left behind by a comet. By studying meteor showers, scientists can learn more about cometary debris, but ESA is going a step further with its Rosetta comet-chasing mission which will examine a comet at close range.

Comets are considered to be the primitive building blocks of the Solar System, and the Rosetta mission could help us to understand if life on Earth began with the help of ‘comet seeding’.

The meteors we see are actually tiny bits of comet debris, most of which are only as big as a grain of sand, so they do not pose a threat to us. However, they do provide a spectacular light show as they vaporise on entering the Earth’s atmosphere. This particular shower is named after the Perseus constellation because the shooting stars can appear to start there, but the material was actually shed by the Comet Swift-Tuttle.

To get the best view of the light show, get as far away from city lights as you can since these affect your ability to see the meteor shower.

Make sure that you are comfortable – gazing at the sky for hours can cause neck strain. Find a reclining garden chair or lay out a blanket on the ground. The meteors can appear in any part of the sky, so make sure that you have as wide a view of it as possible.

However, if poor weather prevents you seeing this spectacular show, or you simply cannot stay awake that long, do not give up. You have a chance to view another set of shooting stars in November 2003 when the Leonid meteor shower comes our way. In the third week of November, the Leonids will appear – though 2002 was supposed to be their last big show for the next 30 years.

The Leonids are the leftovers from Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, and ESA scientists regularly conduct intense observation campaigns of these to understand more about comets and cometary debris.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Asteroid Juno Has a Chunk Out of It

Image credit: Harvard

New images taken by the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory show Asteroid Juno with a huge chunk taken out of it. Harvard astronomer Sallie Baliunas used the adaptive optics system on the Hooker telescope, which compensates for distortions in the atmosphere, to take photos of the 241 km asteroid with incredible clarity. The photos show that Juno is misshapen and has a 100 km crater from an impact with another asteroid in the past.

Cambridge, MA -If someone sneaks a bite of your chocolate chip cookie, they leave behind evidence of their pilferage in the form of a crescent of missing cookie. The same is true in our solar system, where an impact can take a bite out of a planet or moon, leaving behind evidence in the form of a crater. By combining modern technology with a historical telescope, astronomers have discovered that the asteroide Juno has a bite out of it. The first direct images of the surface of Juno show that it is scarred by a fresh impact crater.

Juno, the third asteroid ever discovered, was first spotted by astronomers early in the 19th century. It orbits the Sun with thousands of other bits of space rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. One of the largest asteroids, at a size of 150 miles across, Juno essentially is a leftover building block of the solar system.

Astronomer Sallie Baliunas (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues photographed Juno when it was located relatively nearby in astronomical terms, about 10 percent further from the Earth than the Earth is from the Sun. Even at that distance, Juno appeared very tiny in the sky, subtending only 330 milli-arcseconds – the equivalent of a dime seen at a distance of 7 miles. Imaging Juno at the high resolution needed to resolve surface details thus presented a challenge.

To solve the problem, the scientists used an adaptive optics system connected to the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory. Adaptive optics enables astronomers to compensate for the distortion created by air currents in our planet’s atmosphere, yielding images as sharp and clear as those taken in space.

Their surface maps showed that Juno, like other asteroids, is misshapen rather than round, and that it has “sharp” edges. Even better, as Juno tumbled through space during the night of observing, a “bite” came into view – an area that appeared dark as seen at near-infrared wavelengths. The astronomers concluded that the asteroid had recently (in astronomical terms) collided with another object, resulting in a 60-mile-wide crater, or possibly a smaller crater that is surrounded by a 60-mile blanket of ejecta debris.

“I look at an asteroid as a garden – a garden not of flowers and leaves, but one of rubble and dust churned up by constant impacts. This process of gardening pulverizes the asteroid’s surface into a fine-grained regolith,” said Baliunas. “The recent, large impact on Juno gives us an opportunity to see through the regolith and study excavated material from beneath the surface – a rare look into the material out of which the early Earth was formed.”

The blast that knocked a bite out of Juno may also have provided researchers with a convenient way of studying that asteroid up close without ever leaving our planet. Some meteorites found on the Earth are actually pieces of large asteroids like Juno. Those pieces were broken off and launched into space by an impact, and then fell on our planet. The newly-found impact crater on Juno may have sent samples of that asteroid to the Earth.

This remarkable result demonstrates how technology can be used to renew historical observatories, giving them a new lease on life. The Hooker telescope, now nearing the end of its first century of observing, can use adaptive optics systems to obtain views of the cosmos as clear as though the telescope were in space. Hence, the telescope that Edwin Hubble and his assistant used to discover evidence of the expanding universe continues to make groundbreaking discoveries today.

These results were published in the May 2003 issue of the astronomy journal Icarus.

Original Source: CfA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Canada’s Space Telescope Begins Operations

Image credit: CSA

After one month in space, Canada’s Microvariability & Oscillations of STars (MOST) space telescope began operations for the first time last week. A team of engineers and scientists from Dynacon, and the Universities of Toronto and BC issued the command that opens the door, allowing starlight into the sensitive observatory. MOST will measure the oscillation in the light intensity coming from various stars to help determine their composition and age.

After a perfect launch and orbit insertion one month ago, Canada’s first space telescope – called MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars) – opened its eye to the cosmos for the first time last week. Astronomers traditionally call this milestone for a telescope “first light.”

A joint team of engineers and scientists from Dynacon Inc. and the Universities of Toronto and British Columbia issued the command to open the door on the MOST satellite to allow starlight to strike its sensitive electronic detectors. A star image obtained immediately after this operation confirmed that the optics and electronics are performing well.

MOST Mission Scientist and UBC astronomer Dr. Jaymie Matthews was elated at this successful operation: “One of my worst nightmares was having our superb instrument blind behind a stuck door. This is just another in a series of successful milestones which are a testament to the skills of all the Canadian hardware and software engineers on the MOST team.”

The Canadian Space Agency’s MOST space mission is designed to detect tiny vibrations in starlight and reflected light from planets outside the Solar System. These signals will enable Canadian astronomers to be the first to probe both the hidden deep interiors of stars and the outer atmospheres of mysterious extrasolar planets.

“With MOST, we will finally be able to determine the dynamic composition of stars,” said Steve Torchinsky, scientist with the CSA’s Space Astronomy Program. “Furthermore, since MOST is able to see the light reflected from planets and to record minuscule variations in luminosity, this will provide us with data we never had access to before, since no other telescope – not even Hubble – is capable of collecting this type of information.”

Despite such lofty goals, the MOST satellite has been dubbed the “Humble Space Telescope” because it’s just the mass and size of a suitcase. Its price tag is modest too: only about $10 million. To accomplish science that’s normally the domain of observatories 50 times larger and tens to hundreds of times more expensive, the MOST project has adopted a new approach to space science, as part of the Canadian Space Agency’s Small Payloads initiative.

Packed in the MOST space suitcase are new stabilising technologies from the Canadian aerospace firm Dynacon Inc., innovative microsatellite designs by the SpaceFlight Lab of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), and unique optics and electronics developed at the Department of Physics & Astronomy of the University of British Columbia (UBC).

MOST was launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia on 30 June 2003, entering orbit perfectly. It now circles the Earth every 100 minutes, pole over pole, at an altitude of 820 km. Since orbital insertion, the MOST team has been carefully activating and testing the satellite systems. The satellite was oriented so the telescope opening – still covered by a door to protect it from harmful direct sunlight – was pointed safely away from the Sun. Last Tuesday, MOST team leaders all agreed it was safe to open the door, built by Routes AstroEngineering Ltd. in Ottawa, Ontario.

At the moment, the MOST satellite is in its coarse pointing mode, looking towards the constellation Capricorn. The next step in the mission will be to activate the fine pointing system and redirect the telescope to a pre-selected target star for calibration. Routine scientific operations could begin within a few weeks, and the first public announcement of scientific results is anticipated in the fall.

Original Source: CSA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Cosmonaut Planning Space Marriage

Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko is going ahead with his plans to marry his fianc? from space on August 10, despite protests from the Russian Aerospace Agency. Malenchenko will be represented at the wedding by a lawyer, and he’ll call in from the station during a special time when the astronauts are allowed to call their families. Astronaut Ed Lu quietly arranged to have his tailcoat and ring sent up on a recent Progress cargo ship.

Posted on by Fraser Cain

NASA Picks the Next Mars Lander

Image credit: NASA/JPL

NASA announced on Monday that it has selected the University of Arizona’s “Phoenix” mission to launch to Mars in 2007 as part of its new, low-cost Scout mission. NASA has granted the university $325 million to build the spacecraft, which will land on the planet’s northern pole, which is rich in water ice. The mission will have two goals: to study the geologic history of water, and to search for evidence of a habitable zone that may exist in the ice-soil boundary.

In May 2008, the progeny of two promising U.S. missions to Mars will deploy a lander to the water-ice-rich northern polar region, dig with a robotic arm into arctic terrain for clues on the history of water, and search for environments suitable for microbes.

NASA today announced that it has selected the University of Arizona “Phoenix” mission for launch in 2007 as what is hoped will be the first in a new line of smaller competed “Scout” missions in the agency’s Mars Exploration Program.

Dr. Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory heads the Phoenix mission, named for the mythological bird that is repeatedly reborn of ashes. The $325 million NASA award is more than six times larger than any other single research grant in University of Arizona history.

“The selection of Phoenix completes almost two years of intense competition with other institutions,” Smith said. “I am overjoyed that we can now begin the real work that will lead to a successful mission to Mars.”

Phoenix is a partnership of universities, NASA centers, and the aerospace industry. The science instruments and operations will be a University of Arizona responsibility. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will manage the project and provide mission design. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, will build and test the spacecraft. Canadian partners will provide the meteorological instrumentation, including an innovative laser-based sensor.

Phoenix has the scientific capability “to change our thinking about the origins of life on other worlds,” Smith said. “Even though the northern plains are thought to be too cold now for water to exist as a liquid, periodic variations in the martian orbit allow a warmer climate to develop every 50,000 years. During these periods the ice can melt, dormant organisms could come back to life, (if there are indeed any), and evolution can proceed. Our mission will verify whether the northern plains are indeed a last viable habitat on Mars.”

The lander for Phoenix was built and was being tested to fly as part of the 2001 Mars Surveyor Program, but the program was canceled after the Mars Polar Lander was lost upon landing near Mars’ south pole in December 1999. Since then, the 2001 lander has been stored in a clean room at Lockheed Martin in Denver, managed by NASA’s new Mars Exploration Program as a flight asset.

Renamed Phoenix, it will carry improved versions of University of Arizona panoramic cameras and volatiles-analysis instrument from the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander, as well as experiments that had been built for the 2001 Mars Surveyor Program, including a JPL trench-digging robot arm and a chemistry-microscopy instrument. The science payload also includes a descent imager and a suite of meteorological instruments.

The mission has two goals. One is to study the geologic history of water, the key to unlocking the story of past climate change. Two is to search for evidence of a habitable zone that may exist in the ice-soil boundary, the “biological paydirt.”

The Phoenix robotic arm will scoop up martian soil samples and deliver them for heating into tiny ovens of the volatiles-analysis instrument so team members can measure how much water vapor and carbon dioxide gas are given off, how much water ice the samples contain, and what minerals are present that may have formed during a wetter, warmer past climate. The instrument, called thermal evolved gas analyzer, will also measure any organic volatiles.

Using another instrument, researchers will examine soil particles as small as 16 microns across. They will measure electrical and thermal conductivity of soil particles using a probe on the robotic arm scoop. One of the most interesting experiments is the wet chemistry laboratory, Smith said.

“We plan to scoop up some soil, put it in a cell, add water, shake it up, and measure the impurities dissolved in the water that have leached out from the soil. This is important, because if the soil ever gets wet, we’ll know if microbes could survive. We’ll know if the wet soil is super acidic or alkaline and salty, or full of oxidants that can destroy life. We’ll test the environment that microbes might have had to live and grow in,” Smith said.

Information is available online about NASA’s Mars exploration at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov and about Phoenix at http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu .

Original Source: NASA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Three Gorges Dam Seen From Above

Image credit: ESA

China’s Three Gorges Dam was recently photographed from above by the European Space Agency’s CHRIS instrument on the Proba satellite. Since the sluice gates were closed in June, the water levels have risen 135 metres, and the dam will begin generating its first commercial electricity in August. More than 600,000 people were forced to abandon their homes, and the same number again will have to leave before the waters reach their planned 175 metre depth.

Water churns through diversion holes in the world?s largest dam – China?s Three Gorges project on the Yangtze River, imaged here by ESA?s Proba satellite this week. Seen to the left, the waters behind the dam have risen to a level of 135 metres since the sluice gates were first closed in early June, and in August Three Gorges is due to generate its first commercial hydroelectricity.

The Three Gorges project is set to create a new 600-km-long body of water on the face of the 21st century Earth: the thick concrete dam walls stand 190 metres tall and already they hold back an estimated 10 billion cubic metres of water. More than 600,000 people have had to abandon their homes to the rising reservoir, and as many again will have to relocate before the waters reach their final planned level of 175 metres.

Water flows through dam diversion holes
It can be clearly seen in the image how the river has burst its banks and is inundating the land upriver of the dam. The waters of the world?s third-longest river appear brown in colour because they are heavy with sediment.

Many environmentalists have campaigned against the ?20 billion-plus Three Gorges project due to the drowning of multiple cultural heritage sites, the fear that reservoir will collect industrial pollution and sewage that cannot now be washed to the sea, and the risk posed to downstream populations if the dam should ever break. But the Chinese government says the project will tame the flood-prone Yangtze River and generate much-needed electricity for economic development.

This 18-metre resolution image was acquired by the CHRIS sensor onboard Proba on 30 July 2003.

About Proba
Proba (Project for On Board Autonomy) is a micro-satellite the size of a small box, launched by ESA in October 2001 and operated from ESA’s Redu Ground Station (Belgium). Orbiting 600 km above the Earth?s surface, Proba was designed to be a one-year technology demonstration mission but has since had its lifetime extended as an Earth Observation mission. It now routinely provides scientists with detailed environmental images thanks to CHRIS – a Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer developed by UK-based Sira Electro-Optics Ltd – the main payload on the 100 kg spacecraft.

Proba boasts an ?intelligent? payload, has the ability to observe the same spot on Earth from a number of different angles and can record images of an 18.6 km square area to a resolution of 18 m. More than 60 scientific teams across Europe are making use of Proba data. A follow-on mission, Proba-2, is due to be deployed by ESA around 2005.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Searching For Life on Non-Earthlike Planets

Image credit: NASA

A team of astronomers from Ohio State University believe that we should be seeking life on a wider range of planets than previously speculated. They calculated that NASA’s upcoming Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) should be able to detect habitable planets near stars which are much larger than the Sun. This opens up a whole new range of planets to look at. SIM was originally supposed to launch in 2009, but NASA is considering whether to use these funds to maintain Hubble past 2010 instead.

The search for life on other planets could soon extend to solar systems that are very different from our own, according to a new study by an Ohio State University astronomer and his colleagues.

In fact, finding a terrestrial planet in such a solar system would offer unique scientific opportunities to test evolution, said Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy here.

In a recent issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, he and his coauthors calculated that NASA?s upcoming Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) would be able to detect habitable planets near stars significantly more massive than the sun.

Scientists have typically thought that the search for life should focus on finding planets like Earth that orbit stars like the sun, but this new finding shows that ?the field is wide open,? Gould said.

?Here?s a type of solar system that we never thought to look at,? he added, ?but now we?ll have the tools to do it.?

Gould is on the science team that is helping to plan the SIM mission, and he is working to define the capabilities of the satellite.

The satellite was set to launch in 2009, but its fate is now uncertain. NASA is considering whether to divert funds to maintain the Hubble Space Telescope beyond its scheduled retirement in 2010, Gould explained, and he has been asked to address the issue for an assembly of astronomers in Washington D.C. on Thursday, July 31.

SIM would help astronomers find habitable planets, Gould said. The key is detecting planets that circle a star at just the right distance to maintain a supply of liquid water. The range of most promising orbits depends on the type of the star, and is called the ?habitable zone.?

The earth resides directly in the habitable zone for our solar system, some 93 million miles from the sun. The nearest planets, Venus and Mars, barely lie within the edges of the habitable zone.

Hotter, more massive stars have always been considered less likely to harbor life, though not because they would be too hot. Planets could still enjoy temperate climates, just at orbits farther away from the star.

The problem is one of time, not temperature, Gould said.
Hotter stars tend to ?burn out? faster — perhaps too fast for life to develop there.

Our sun is approximately 4.5 billion years old; in contrast, one of the stars examined in the study is 1.5 times more massive than the sun, and would probably only generate life-sustaining energy for about two billion years.

Given the billions of years required for evolution of life on earth, scientists could question whether life would stand a chance in a shorter-lived solar system.

?We have no idea how evolution would proceed on any planet other than our own,? Gould said. ?If we find a planet around a shorter-lived star, we may be able to test what would happen to evolution under those circumstances.?

SIM will use Interferometry — a technique that involves the interference of light waves — to very accurately measure the position of stars in the sky. The satellite would notice, for instance, if a point of light on the surface of the moon moved the width of a dime.

In the case of distant stars, SIM will pick up on the tiny wobble in the position of a star caused by the gravity of its orbiting planets.

That?s what will make SIM ideal for studying hotter, massive stars, Gould said. Planets that orbit far from a star — as the habitable planets around a hot star would have to do — create a larger wobble.

He and study coauthors Eric B. Ford of Princeton University and Debra A. Fischer of the University of California, Berkeley, determined that SIM is sensitive enough for the task.

Previously, Gould and Ohio State professor Darren DePoy and graduate student Joshua Pepper determined that another future NASA mission could be used to find habitable planets around very small stars, which are much more plentiful in the galaxy than stars like our sun.

That mission, the Kepler Mission, will detect planetary transits — events where planets pass in front of a star and block the star?s light from reaching earth. Transits of planets orbiting close to a star are easier to detect, and because these small stars are very dim, the habitable zone would also be very close to the star.

?The point is that the various methods for planet detection complement each other, and can be used to find habitable planets around a wide variety of stars,? Gould said.

NASA funded this research.

Original Source: OSU News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Local Galactic Dust is on the Rise

Image credit: ESA

New observations from the European Space Agency’s Ulysses spacecraft show that galactic dust in the Milky Way is passing through our solar system more than normal. The Sun’s magnetic field normally forms a barrier around our solar system that forces dust to go around us, but the Sun has reached the high point of its 11-year cycle, and the magnetic field is highly disordered – so the interstellar dust is coming through the solar system more directly. Although it has no direct effects on the planets, the dust impacts asteroids and comets producing more fragments, and may increase the amount of material that rains down on the Earth.

Since early 1992 Ulysses has been monitoring the stream of stardust flowing through our Solar System. The stardust is embedded in the local galactic cloud through which the Sun is moving at a speed of 26 kilometres every second. As a result of this relative motion, a single dust grain takes twenty years to traverse the Solar System. Observations by the DUST experiment on board Ulysses have shown that the stream of stardust is highly affected by the Sun’s magnetic field.

In the 1990s, this field, which is drawn out deep into space by the out-flowing solar wind, kept most of the stardust out. The most recent data, collected up to the end of 2002, shows that this magnetic shield has lost its protective power during the recent solar maximum. In an upcoming publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research ESA scientist Markus Landgraf and his co-workers from the Max-Planck-Institute in Heidelberg report that about three times more stardust is now able to enter the Solar System.

The reason for the weakening of the Sun’s magnetic shield is the increased solar activity, which leads to a highly disordered field configuration. In the mid-1990s, during the last solar minimum, the Sun’s magnetic field resembled a dipole field with well-defined magnetic poles (North positive, South negative), very much like the Earth. Unlike Earth, however, the Sun reverses its magnetic polarity every 11 years. The reversal always occurs during solar maximum. That’s when the magnetic field is highly disordered, allowing more interstellar dust to enter the Solar System. It is interesting to note that in the reversed configuration after the recent solar maximum (North negative, South positive), the interstellar dust is even channelled more efficiently towards the inner Solar System. So we can expect even more interstellar dust from 2005 onwards, once the changes become fully effective.

While grains of stardust are very small, about one hundredth the diameter of a human hair, they do not directly influence the planets of the Solar System. However, the dust particles move very fast, and produce large numbers of fragments when they impact asteroids or comets. It is therefore conceivable that an increase in the amount of interstellar dust in the Solar System will create more cosmic dust by collisions with asteroids and comets. We know from the measurements by high-flying aircraft that 40 000 tonnes dust from asteroids and comets enters the Earth’s atmosphere each year. It is possible that the increase of stardust in the Solar System will influence the amount of extraterrestrial material that rains down to Earth.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Largest Robotic Telescope Begins Operations

The Liverpool Telescope, the world’s largest robotic observatory, began operations this week. The 2-metre telescope is operated from Liverpool John Moores University, but it’s actually located in the Canary Islands, and run remotely. The telescope is especially suited to watching astronomical objects which change over time, such as Gamma Ray Bursts, supernovae, asteroids and comets. 5% of its time has been donated to the National Schools’ Observatory program, allowing school children to perform astronomy research.

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Sea Launch Heads Out

Image credit: Sea Launch

The Odyssey platform and Sea Launch Commander departed home port in California to make the journey down to the Earth’s equator in the Pacific Ocean. This time Sea Launch will loft the EchoStar IX/Telstar 13 broadcast satellite on board a Zenit-3SL rocket. The two-hour launch window is scheduled to begin on August 8 at 0331 GMT (11:31 pm EDT).

The Odyssey Launch Platform and the Sea Launch Commander have departed Sea Launch Home Port for the launch of the EchoStar IX/Telstar 13 satellite for EchoStar Communications Corporation and Loral Skynet. Liftoff is scheduled for August 7, in a two-hour launch window that will open at 8:31 pm PDT (3:31:00 GMT).

The Sea Launch vessels are sailing from Sea Launch Home Port, in the Port of Long Beach, Calif., to the launch site on the Equator at 154? West Longitude. Upon arrival, a 72-hour countdown will begin and the platform will be ballasted to launch depth. Over the course of the three-day countdown, the launch team will perform final tests on the rocket and spacecraft, and prepare for launch operations. The three-stage Zenit-3SL rocket will loft the 4,737 kg (10,443 lb) EchoStar IX/Telstar 13 satellite to a high perigee of 760 km in geosynchronous transfer orbit.

This is the first of several launch contracts Sea Launch will execute for Space Systems/Loral, the spacecraft manufacturer. The LS-1300-class satellite will be operational in its final position in geostationary orbit at 121? West Longitude. EchoStar?s Ku-band fixed satellite services (FSS) transponders are designed to enhance its U.S. DISH Network service. The spacecraft is also equipped with one of the first commercial Ka-band spot-beam payloads in the United States as well as a C-band payload.

In a unique satellite-sharing arrangement, EchoStar will own the Ku- and Ka-band payloads on this satellite. Loral Skynet, a subsidiary of Loral Space & Communications based in Bedminster, N.J., will own and operate the C-band capacity as Telstar 13. From its ideal orbital location and its 24 C-band transponders operating at 36 MHz, Telstar 13 will provide programmers with coverage of North America, including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Central America.

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 15 firm launch contracts. For additional information and live coverage of this mission, visit the Sea Launch website at: www.sea-launch.com

Note to editors: Sea Launch will carry a live satellite feed and streaming video of the entire mission on the day of launch. We will post transponder coordinates as well as additional information and high resolution images on a media site at: www.boeing.com/nosearch/sealaunch/

Original Source: Boeing News Release