“Although we are considering a development of accelerating ice loss in Antarctica, we had measured East Antarctica to be inviolate,” said lead author and Senior Research Scientist Jianli Chen of the university’s Center for Space Research. “But if it is losing mass, as our data points out, it may be a sign the state of East Antarctica has altered. Since it’s the largest ice sheet on Earth, ice loss there can have a large impact on international sea level rise in the future.”

The $445 million rocket is the original of its variety — a model of the vehicle NASA plans to carry people to orbit and the moon; however it is based on space shuttle and other previous hardware. The test launch was slated to lift off at 8 a.m. ET, even though launch managers believed weather almost certainly won’t oblige until about 10:30 a.m.

An anticipated 154 lightning strikes were reported within a five-mile (eight-kilometer) radius of the launch pad during the night. Launch controllers were retesting the Ares I-X rocket systems to confirm nothing was damaged. The additional work postponed Wednesday morning’s liftoff. The launch test is planned to learn how well this rocket design works by congregating information from over 700 onboard sensors.

Recurring attempts to launch the rocket Tuesday were let down by clouds, strong winds, and the danger of an occurrence called “triboelectrification,” which can be produced when a rocket passes through clouds and triggers static electricity that may perhaps hinder with the vehicle’s instruments. Other actions, similar to a stuck sock-like apparatus cover, which crews had difficulty pulling off the rocket, additionally inundated takeoff plans.

Although NASA had a four-hour window beginning at 8 a.m. ET to attempt to loft the rocket, circumstances by no means lined up and mission managers gave up for the day at around 11:30 a.m.

The lean, 100m-tall Ares I-X vehicle was made-up to check technology critical for the growth of a manned craft.

A arrangement of elevated wind speeds and clouds contributed to Nasa’s result to scrub the launch at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

The trial craft has two additional four-hour launch windows among 0800 and 1200 EDT on 28 and 29 October.

The craft is the foremost fresh launch vehicle that NASA has designed and built in over three decades.

Before the planned take-off, a material cover designed to guard a look into on the nose of the craft even as it was on the launch pad became knotted. It was lastly free to a round of applause by the mission team.

Lastly, bad weather preserved the fortune of the vehicle’s initial planned launch effort. Winds at ground level were blowing higher than 20 knots, greater than permissible for launch, and clouds covered the pad.

The flight team was mainly anxious about the cloud coverage, partially since they required clear skies to observe the flight but also because of a difficulty known as “tribo-electrification”.

This phenomenon takes place when the rocket encounters water or ice droplets in the clouds. As these collide with the rocket it causes a static charge to build up on the rocket’s skin, creating interfering with radio signals.

This is a difficulty for the 1-X team, which needs clear signals to collect data from the 700 sensors wired all through the vehicle designed to accumulate flight data.

The slim-line rocket is a prototype of the Ares I craft, part of the Constellation programme intended to come back to the US to the Moon by 2020.

Latest images demonstrate a mile-high plume of lunar debris from the Cabeus crater soon after the space agency’s Centaur rocket struck on October 9.

“We were blown away by the data returned,” the mission’s chief scientist Anthony Colaprete said in a report on Friday from the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, which managed the launch. “The team is working hard on the analysis, and the data appear to be of very high quality.”

In media coverage after the impact, lots of observers said they were dissatisfied at the lack of demonstration. However scientists believed the mission was carried out for “a scientific purpose, not to put on a fireworks display for the public,” said space consultant Alan Stern, a former NASA associate administrator for science.

But Michio Kaku, a professor at the City College of New York and host of Sci Q Sundays on the Science Channel, said NASA might be jumping the gun in calling the consequences “a smashing success,” acting in response to public criticism of the mission.

“They got beautiful pictures of the event, but that’s not why we spent $79 million,” Kaku said. “Ice on the moon is more valuable than gold.”

This test could make it possible to land larger payloads on Mars. A vacuum-packed inflatable shroud could enable future spacecraft reentry on both Earth and Mars.

The Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE) was vacuum-packed into a 15-inch diameter payload “shroud” and launched on a small sounding rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va.

Nitrogen inflated the 10-foot diameter heat shield, made of several layers of silicone-coated industrial fabric, inflated with nitrogen to a mushroom shape in space several minutes after liftoff.

The Black Brant 9 rocket took approximately four minutes to lift the experiment to an altitude of 131 miles. Less than a minute later it was released from its cover and started inflating on schedule at 124 miles up.

The inflation of the shield took less than 90 seconds.

The Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment is an example of how NASA is using its aeronautics expertise to support the development of future spacecraft.