NASA Aims for Oct. 6 Launch of Sun Probe

NASA officials announced Tuesday that they will attempt to launch the space shuttle Discovery, carrying a sun-probing satellite, on Oct. 6.

Discovery is scheduled to lift off at 4:35 a.m. PDT with five astronauts who will send the European satellite on a five-year journey to study the sun’s polar regions. It would be the first spacecraft to orbit the solar poles.

“This date is a little success-oriented and is dependent on not encountering any unusual problems,” shuttle director Robert Crippen said. “But I think the shuttle team has a good chance of making the 6th.”

NASA’s last shuttle flight was in April, when Discovery carried the flawed Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. Soon afterward, the rest of the fleet, Columbia and Atlantis, were crippled by hydrogen leaks.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials repeatedly have said they are confident that Discovery’s fuel lines are leak-free because of the shuttle’s flight performance in April and the minimal amount of work performed in its engine compartment since then.

NASA faces an Oct. 23 launch deadline for Discovery and the plutonium-powered sun probe, named for the legendary Greek adventurer Ulysses. If Discovery does not lift off by then, the mission will have to wait until the planets are properly aligned again in late 1991.