WASHINGTON NASA has chosen Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Virginia to build an atmospheric ozone monitoring satellite for launch next year. The company was also negotiating with the civil space agency to package a Taurus launch vehicle in the deal, believed to be worth $23 million for both satellite and booster. Once launched, the QuikTOMS would operate in polar orbit on a three-year space mission to study the composition of the Earths ozone layer. Management of the project will be conducted by NASAs Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

For the QuikTOMS mission, Orbital has chosen its lightweight MicroStar satellite bus to house the spacecrafts subsystems and instruments. The bus will be a standard assembly line flight unit, now in use on 45 satellite platforms in a variety of missions. The MicroStar bus is also the satellite design chosen for the Teledesic satellite system. Orbital will also build and fly the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) on the satellite. Four previous TOMS space sensors have flown on NASA, Russian, and Japanese space science satellites. The last TOMS sensor was launched in 1996, and is still in operation today, providing data on dust storms, forest fires, and UV radiation.

A four-stage version of the Taurus, competitive with Lockheed Martin's Athena 2 rocket, would be used. Three previous Taurus launches, all successful, have been conducted for civil and military customers, flying from the Air Force space facility at Vandenberg Air Base, California. This would be the first Taurus launch contract announced this year.

Orbital also announced it will build a mission operations facility for the QuikTOMS mission near its Dulles, Virginia headquarters. The ground station will be modeled after the companys Orbimage facility operating the Orbview 1 and 2 remote sensing satellites.