The National Security Agency had no immediate comment on the classified equipment reported to be aboard the cargo ship. We have no injuries in the operation today.' The spacecraft was carrying 'some classified cryptographic equipment, so we do need to maintain the area around the debris in a secure manner,' said Mike Pinkston, the company's Antares program manager. 'And then I came back in to work and seen fire trucks going every which way.' NASA said no one was in the vicinity of the explosion, and Orbital Sciences said in a statement: 'We've confirmed that all personnel have been accounted for.

'We were standing outside waiting for it to launch and we saw bright red, and then we saw a big black cloud, and it shook the whole building where we work,' Miller said. Ronda Miller, manager of the Ocean Deli in Wallops Island, Virginia, told Reuters she felt the force of the blast from the eatery, about 5 miles (8 km) from the launch pad. The cause of the mishap was under investigation, said Frank Culbertson, Orbital Sciences executive vice president.įootage of Tuesday's launch showed the Antares rising slowly into the night sky as flames suddenly engulfed the rocket, from the bottom to the top about 11 seconds after liftoff, before the vehicle sank back downward in a conflagration. Orbital Sciences stock fell 15.5 percent to a two-month low of $25.65 in after-hours trading. Suffredini added that the crew has enough food and other supplies aboard to last four to six months. 'There was no cargo that was absolutely critical' aboard Cygnus, Nasa Associate Administrator William Gerstenmaier said. With a Russian cargo ship due to reach the space station on Wednesday, just 14 hours after the explosion in Virginia, the loss of the Cygnus vessel posed no immediate problem for the orbiting team. of course they are well aware that they have plenty of resources on orbit,' Suffredini told reporters during a conference call. The six crew members in orbit aboard the space station - two NASA astronauts, one from the European Space Agency and three Russian cosmonauts - watched the launch via a NASA TV feed, said Mike Suffredini, the space station program manager. It burst into flames moments later, then plunged to the ground in a huge ball of fire and smoke, but authorities said no one was hurt. The 14-story rocket, built and launched by Orbital Sciences Corp, blasted off its seaside launch pad at the Wallops Flight Facility at 6.22pm local time, carrying a Cygnus cargo ship bound for the space station. The energy then collides with particles in our atmosphere and causes the particles to give off the light that is associated with the auroras.An unmanned Antares rocket exploded seconds after lift-off from a commercial launch pad in Virginia on Tuesday, marking the first accident since Nasa turned to private operators to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. Once it arrives at Earth, this energy from the sun is transported along our planet's magnetic field lines. It is a type of plasma that consists of protons and electrons. This energy is sometimes called solar wind. One visible effect of the sun's energy hitting the Earth's magnetic field is polar lights, also called aurora borealis in the north and aurora australis in the south. They would quickly become more violet, though, which would make them increasingly hard to see for casual observers based on the ground.

Tony Rice, a solar system ambassador at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the Carolina Weather Group: 'This data can tell us a lot about space weather, it can tell us a lot about how energy moves from the sun through our upper atmosphere and ultimately down.'Īhead of the launch, NASA said it was possible the clouds would be visible for about 30 seconds after they were released from the rocket, and would take on a green-violet color. This cloud then got ionized-electrically charged-by sunlight, and spread out across the lines of the Earth's magnetic field. To do this, they designed the rocket to release a cloud of barium vapor high above the Earth once it reached an altitude of between 217 and 249 miles over the Atlantic Ocean. The Earth's magnetic field is produced by the rotating liquid section of the planet's outer core.

Scientists used the rocket's on-board tools to examine how energy is transported across the Earth's magnetic field. The rocket was launched as part of the KiNET-X mission. China Lands Spacecraft on Mars for 1st Time, Plans Hook-up with US Vehicle.Russia to Film Movie in Space as Tom Cruise Prepares for Flight.NASA Telescope Opens Mirror on Earth for Last Time Before Orbiting Sun.

Nasa wallops launch video