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NASA launches Landsat Earth observation satellite

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from California and safely boosted a new Earth-watching Landsat into a polar orbit today to kick off an $855 million mission. It's the latest chapter in a 40-year program to monitor the planet's resources, land use, and environmental changes.

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission, or LDCM, got underway at 10:02 a.m. PT when the Atlas 5's Russian-designed RD-180 first-stage engine thundered to life and throttled up to full power with a rush of brilliant exhaust.

The towering 192-foot-tall rocket, generating some 860,000 pounds of thrust, … Read more

NASA sends NuStar black-hole hunter into space

A small X-ray telescope was boosted into orbit by an air-launched Pegasus XL rocket Wednesday, the first step in an ambitious low-cost mission to study supermassive black holes believed to be lurking at the cores of galaxies like Earth's Milky Way and probe the creation of heavy elements in the cataclysmic death throes of massive stars.

The innovative telescope, built around an extendable 33-foot-long Tinkertoy-like mast with nested X-ray mirrors on one end and sensitive detectors on the other, also will study the mechanisms responsible for stellar explosions and look for clues about what powers the energetic jets of … Read more

NASA science satellite lost in $424 million launch failure

NASA's Glory atmospheric research mission satellite crashed into the southern Pacific Ocean early today after a protective nose cone fairing failed to separate during launch aboard an Orbital Sciences Corp. Taurus XL rocket. The $424 million failure was the second in a row for the Orbital Sciences booster following the 2009 loss of another environmental satellite due to a similar nose cone malfunction.

"I think it's not an understatement to say tonight we're all pretty devastated," said Ronald Grabe, a former space shuttle commander who now manages Orbital's Launch Systems Group. "But we … Read more