Black Brant Launches NASA CIBER Probe on Final Flight

A tiny astrophysics probe made its fourth and final suborbital flight June 5 when it launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia aboard a Black Brant 12 sounding rocket.

The Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment (CIBER), a compact astrophysics observatory that has been launched and recovered for reflight three times since 2009, was lofted at 11:05 p.m. EDT to an altitude approximately 576 kilometers above the Atlantic Ocean, NASA said in a June 6 statement. As planned, CIBER will not be recovered. 

Wallops’ next rocket launch is scheduled for June 20, when a Terrier-Orion sounding rocket is slated to loft experiments developed by participants in the RockOn and RockSat-C programs conducted by the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant consortia.