George Diller: And with us here now is Omar Baez, the NASA launch director for launch today. Omar, first of all, let's go to the bottom line. What did we see in the Pegasus data as far as the success of the launch today? Omar Baez: The Pegasus data and the launch success today has been incredible. The vehicle really performed as it should, as it always has, and a very successful mission for the Pegasus phase. And I wish the DART guys in their phase of it the same good luck. George Diller: The last nine minutes or so, or 13 minutes, were fairly busy and there seemed to be some issues being, being worked in the final minutes there that worked through fairly successfully. But can you tell us what all was going on, because it seemed very busy. Omar Baez: It was extremely busy. George, a Pegasus mission always seems like it's going calm and it's inevitable we, we get into a situation where you're in the last minutes and something's going wrong or is out of its normal state and you've got to come to a resolution on it pretty quick here, because we're on a tight timeline in flying through that imaginary box in the airspace there. We've got very short windows and a very short time to react. What was happening there was we lost what's called our 'pilot' tone, and it's what we use to make sure we're locked in with the range assets to make sure that in a case of erratic flight or something unusual with the vehicle that the local range here can terminate the mission. And we were in a situation where we were in the turning phase of the mission or where the L-1011 is doing their turn back towards the launch drop point and we lost a pilot tone simultaneously on both sides. We have an A and a B side. That's very unusual to see and, and, but you can quickly come to a resolution on it and, and exonerate that it's not coming from the launch vehicle cause there's two independent sides there. So there was a couple things at play. We were having comm. trouble early on, communication trouble between the ground and the airplanes, and there was an opp. happening at Edwards Air Force Base that could have been interfering with us. Another of the variables that we had in here is we're flying an F-18 chase plane, and sometimes the chase plane can get in-between the signal being sent from the ground antennas up to where the Pegasus are, and you could lose lock in those situations. There's a lot of RF environment also up there coming back from not only the rocket but the chase plane and its cameras is also transmitting. So there was a lot of emissions going on there and that was probably the likely cause. Once we got out of our turn and into the straight and level flight path, we did see a dropout but it was on one side and it was momentary. And so that's not of a concern. It's a concern when you lose both sides of that and it's for extended periods of time, so... It took us awhile, and it was a critical point when we're doing our polling, and it kind of sounded disjointed there but believe me, we knew exactly what we needed to do and had we needed to, we would have called it a day. So it all worked out well and DART's been a long time coming, and we finally got it off. And hopefully these guys can go out and, and, and do what this mission is intended to do and try out this technology. George Diller: Well, Omar, I guess we can kind of come to a conclusion here by saying that the L-1011 is back on the ground. We're seeing it taxi right now from the runway back to the, to the ramp. So, with that, and as far as the launch phase is concerned, it looks like that's gone well. We're off to a good start and hopefully the spacecraft team will have what they've bargained for for a quite some time now. Because we're off and running and there's a lot of exciting technology that we're gonna hope to prove here in the next, in the next, next 23 hours or so. Omar Baez: Absolutely. George Diller: So Omar, thank you very much and we'll be talking to you again. We've got another mission coming up fairly closely out here, do we not? Omar Baez: Yeah, it, it seems like I'm gonna have to move out to California pretty soon. Yeah, I've got about a 10-day turnaround before I've gotta come back and do the NOAA-L mission, which is scheduled for May 11. And yeah, we'll be right back here and working that mission on a Delta II. George Diller: Right. NOAA, NOAA-N and it's... Omar Baez: That's NOAA-N, that's right. George Diller: They're, they're just about ready to be put into their transportation container to go out to the launch pad, I believe about April 20. So they're now number one on the runway out here. Omar Baez: Yup. George Diller: So. Alright, well, thank you, Omar. And that will conclude our launch coverage of Pegasus_DART for the moment, with launch having been successful. Now we're moving into the mission phase, which we'll be following now until later tomorrow morning and returning again for our next launch at Vandenberg on May the 11th on a Delta II with NOAA-N. This is Pegasus launch control.
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ksc_041505_dart_baez1
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April 20, 2005
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