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WASHINGTON – A herb carrying an Earth-observation equipment is in the Pacific Ocean after a failed start attempt, NASA officials said Friday.

The Taurus XL herb carrying NASA's Glory equipment lifted off around 2:10 a.m. PST from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

During a programme word weekday officials explained that a conserving bomb or fairing atop the herb did not removed from the equipment as it should hit most threesome transactions after the launch. That left the Glory equipment without the velocity to reach orbit.

NASA suffered a similar chance digit eld past when a equipment that would hit studied orbicular warming crashed into the ocean nearby Antarctica after actuation from the aforementioned category of herb that carried Glory. Officials said weekday that Glory probable wound up landing nearby where the preceding equipment did.

"We failed to attain orbit," NASA start administrator Omar Baez said Friday. "Indications are that the equipment and herb ... is in the southern Pacific Ocean somewhere."

Had Glory reached orbit it would hit been on a three-year assignment to analyze how airborne particles modify Earth's climate. Besides monitoring particles in the atmosphere, it would also hit tracked solar irradiation to determine the sun's gist on status change.

Glory was supposed to study tiny part particles famous as aerosols, which emit and hole sunlight. The vast eld occurs naturally, spewed into the region by volcanoes, land fires and desert storms. Aerosols crapper also become from manmade sources much as the burning of fossil fuel.

The $424 meg assignment is managed by the NASA's physicist Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Friday's start came after engineers spent more than a week troubleshooting a flaw that led to a last-minute scrub and digit eld studying what went criminal with the 2009 assignment that also crashed.

An accident board was formed to investigate and nonindulgent action was condemned to prevent forthcoming problems. A replicate is today scheduled to control from Vandenberg in 2013.

Investigators spent several months investigating hardware, interviewing engineers and reviewing accumulation and documents. The enquiry did not encounter grounds of distributed investigating nonaccomplishment or management shortcomings, but NASA declined to promulgation the full accident report, citing sensitive and copyrighted information.

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