NASA GOLD makes orbit despite Ariane-5 rocket mishap

NASA has successfully made contact with its new GOLD satellite, after fears that a launch anomaly could have destroyed the expensive instrument. Ariane 5 took off from the Kourou spaceport near French Guiana yesterday night, but ground control unexpectedly lost contact with its telemetry roughly nine minutes into flight.

It could have been an expensive glitch. The mission was carrying a number of satellites intended to be established into Earth orbit, including hardware for telecommunications. A satellite being used for NASA's Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD, mission was also onboard. SES-14 will be an instrumental part of the space agency's new atmospheric monitoring system.

With it, NASA hopes to examine the way that space and the Earth's upper atmosphere intermingle. It's not just idle curiosity, either: a better understanding of the dynamics and forces in play, it's suggested, could allow for far improved space weather event forecasting. This has a big impact not only on conditions for satellites and astronauts in space, but the weather and other conditions back down on Earth.

With Ariane-5 going silent, the fear had been that SES-14 and the other satellites were lost altogether. However, in a statement from SES, it's been confirmed that despite the unusual launch the satellite has, indeed, made it into space safely.

"Following the anomaly that occurred during the launch on an Ariane 5 rocket last night, SES announces that it has successfully established a telemetry and telecommand connection to its SES-14 spacecraft and is setting up a new orbit raising plan now," the satellite organization said. "SES-14 would thus reach the geostationary orbit only four weeks later than originally planned. SES confirms that the spacecraft is in good health, all subsystems on board are nominal, and the satellite is expected to meet the designed life time."

SES-14 was manufactured by Airbus, and will be used for a variety of purposes in addition to NASA's GOLD mission. For instance, it will provide telecommunications service for aeronautical and maritime clients, in addition to cellular backhaul and broadband delivery. SES says it's intended to last for 15 years.

As for what went wrong with the rocket itself, that's going to be the topic of a European Space Agency investigation. "Initial investigations show that the situation results from a trajectory deviation," a statement from Arianspace said of the glitch. "At the end of the mission, the launcher separated both satellites on a stable orbit."