1st LD: SpaceX launches satellite to deep space for 1st time

Private U.S. firm SpaceX on Wednesday launched a satellite for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to monitor the solar wind and aid in space weather forecasts on Earth in what marked its first deep space mission.

The satellite, known as Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), blasted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 6:03 p.m. EDT (2303 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

The California-based company originally scheduled to land the rocket's first stage to a floating ocean platform, but said early Wednesday that such recovery is impossible due to extreme weather at the landing site.

Instead, SpaceX chose to land the rocket softly in the ocean, acknowledging that survival is "highly unlikely."

The floating platform "was designed to operate in all but the most extreme weather. We are experiencing just such weather in the Atlantic with waves reaching up to three stories in height crashing over the decks," SpaceX said in a statement before launch.

"Also, only three of the drone ship's four engines are functioning, making station-keeping in the face of such wave action extremely difficult."

The company's first attempt on Jan. 10 ended with the first stage landing hard on the platform, which is about 91 meters long and 52 meters wide.

The primary mission of the rocket is to send the DSCOVR, a 340- million-U.S. dollar partnership between the NOAA, the U.S. space agency NASA and the U.S. Air Force, to a place about a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth where the gravity of Earth and the sun is balanced.

From that location, also known as Lagrangian point 1, the spacecraft will succeed NASA's 17-year-old Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) to observe the solar wind that can affect power grids, communications systems and satellites close to Earth.

The U.S. agencies said this satellite location is the only place to provide 15-to-60 minute warning time before a potentially dangerous solar storm could hit Earth.

The DSCOVR, formerly known as Triana, was originally conceived in the late 1990s as a NASA Earth science mission that would primarily provide a near continuous view of Earth and measure how much sunlight is reflected and emitted from the whole Earth.

The Triana program was suspended and the satellite went into storage in 2001. Seven years later, the U.S. government re- examined the satellite and determined that it was the optimal solution for meeting NOAA space weather requirements.

NASA then renamed the satellite DSCOVR and repurposed it as a solar observatory to replace the aging ACE spacecraft, which will go into a backup status for the NOAA after the replacement. Endite