Community Corner

NASA Moonshot Visible From Long Island

Did anyone in the Five Towns area see it?

Written by Joe Dowd

A stunning display of NASA's engineering prowess was visible in the clear night skies over Long Island late Friday and captured by a young Plainview photographer.

Appearing as a streaking trail of light, a rocket carrying the unmanned LADEE lunar orbiter was visible in the southeastern skies at 11:29 p.m., T+80, or 80 seconds after launch from a small island off the Virginia coast.

It was "one of the coolest things I've ever seen," wrote Plainview's Deb Billian Baer in Facebook dispatches to Patch. Her daughter, Rachel, captured the image from her I-Phone.

"It was moving fast!" she said.

It surely was:

In launch data monitored by Patch, NASA reported the spacecraft, just moments after it disappeared from Long Island's view, was moving at 8 km per second (4.2 miles/second).

To the naked eye, the rocket seemed to change trajectory suddenly about two minutes into the flight, visible at about 30-40 degrees on the southeastern horizon. NASA data indicated that the directional change was the "second-stage burnout," when the second of five propulsion rockets was jettisoned and the third rocket ignited. (See the launch and the burn sequences here.)

Within 15 minutes of launch, NASA reported the spacecraft had burned off its fifth stage, was "nominal," meaning operating normally and on trajectory, and hurtling over the coast of Africa.

At that point, the NASA capcom was heard saying "God Speed, LADEE, on your journey to the moon."

LADEE, short for the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, is enroute to the moon to measure elements of the thin lunar atmosphere. NASA is seeking "detailed information about the lunar atmosphere, conditions near the surface and environmental influences on lunar dust," according to the U.S. space agency.

Powered by a U.S. Air Force Minotaur rocket built by Orbital Sciences Corp., LADEE will circle the earth three times before heading to the moon a journey that is expected to take a month. It left earth at 11:27 p.m. Friday from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, the first moon shot to blast off from the Virginia coast.

The six-month, $280 million mission will send back atmospheric data to NASA that has never been analyzed and could reveal information about other planets.

At mission's end, LADEE, which is about the size of an automobile, will make a suicide plunge onto the lunar surface, NASA reported.



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