19911776 Club
Discovery lifts off to release a satellite built to watch the ozone layer
A noise glitch on the air-to-ground radio link held the countdown fourteen minutes before Kennedy Space Center cleared it for launch.
By 1991, scientists had spent a decade watching a hole open in the ozone layer over Antarctica, and NASA wanted a satellite dedicated to finding out why. On September 12, 1991, Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 7:11 p.m. EDT on mission STS-48, carrying the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite in its cargo bay. The countdown had stalled for fourteen minutes at T-minus-5 over static on the air-to-ground radio link before controllers cleared it. Three days later, the crew released UARS into orbit 650 kilometers up, the first satellite built for NASA's new Mission to Planet Earth program…
