The BA Festival of Science: Unintended consequence of LHC?
Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
The launch of a new European Space Agency (ESA) satellite has been delayed. The Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) was due to be launched today (its mission is to map the Earth's gravitational field in unprecedented detail) but the launch has been delayed until October 5 due to dodgy sat nav.
Perhaps they realised that the competition from the LHC, aptly renamed the License for Huge Coverage on the Great Beyond, might ruin their big day?
On Monday, ESA's Launch Campaign Manager Jürgen Schmid was reported on ScienceDaily as saying that "So far the GOCE launch preparation activities have gone quite smoothly". The same day, they reported that launch preparations had stopped "due to an anomaly identified in one of the units of the guidance and navigation subsystem".
In a press conference today at the festival organised by one of the funders, the Natural Environment Research Council, Marek Ziebert from University College London let slip that this problem has happened before on a different launch. Ziebert suggested that it was the responsible thing to delay the launch until it was fixed. Not just bad timing then?
