karn (09/11/82)
I have no further real information yet on the Ariane launch failure that occurred about 24 hours ago. I did speak today with one of the people at Goddard Space Flight Center whose job it was to process early tracking data for orbit determination, and he basically confirmed what we knew last night (and which I posted to the net). He told me that the failure occurred sometime after scheduled loss of signal at the Brazilian tracking station and before acquisition at the NASA station on Ascension Island. For this reason, there were no ground telemetry recordings being made at the time the failure occurred. This may make the failure hard to analyze. When the pass did occur over Ascension, the launcher barely skimmed the horizon rather than appearing at the 12 degree maximum elevation that was predicted. Due to the low elevation, the S-band radar data was useless, although several minutes of VHF telemetry data were apparently obtained. This indicates that the launcher did not simply explode, but that either the guidance system failed (less likely) or the third stage engine shut down prematurely (more likely). Part of the problem was that Kourou kept overriding the Ascension tracking antennas, telling them that they were looking too low, while the automatic tracking systems kept insisting that the pre-programmed look angles were wrong. This apparently resulted in intermittent telemetry loss. NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command) did not see anything in orbit after the launch, including debris, so it is concluded that the launcher and its payload broke up on re-entry and impacted in the Atlantic northwest of Ascension. Phil Karn