Will 7th Try Be Lucky For NASA's East Coast Rocket This Weekend?

NASA is hopeful that its seventh scheduled rocket liftoff in eight days will be its luckiest.

Look to the Southeast for a swiftly-moving object with a green-violet vapor trail starting at 8:10 p.m. on Saturday, May 15.

After canceling six liftoffs, NASA’s rocket launch has been rescheduled at Wallops Flight Facility in eastern Virginia and should be visible in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York weather-permitting. 

Strong winds and a mechanical launcher issue scrubbed earlier scheduled launches, NASA said.

Binoculars and telescopes are a plus, but are not required to see the rocket, NASA says. If skies are clear the rocket and its vapor trail can be seen with the naked eye. 

The rocket may be visible in South Jersey within 10 seconds of the launch, in Central Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania and New York City between 10 to 30 seconds after launch, and in far northern New Jersey, most of Pennsylvania and most of New York state from 30 to 60 seconds after the launch, according to NASA.

“For most people, the rocket is going to look like a small dot moving quickly through the sky, similar to the International Space Station passing over, but much faster,” NASA said on the Wallops Flight Facility Twitter page.

This NASA mission is known as KiNet-X, and the space agency says it is designed to study how “explore energy transport between different regions of space that are magnetically connected.”

For more details from NASA, click here. 

If you don’t have a decent vantage point to see the rocket launch, it can be viewed on this NASA video feed. 

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