An experimental Air Force
satellite designed to monitor the Earth's ionosphere and foresee impending
communication disruptions was successfully deployed into space Wednesday by an
Orbital Sciences air-launched Pegasus rocket.
An L-1011 carrier jet
hauled the winged rocket over the mid-Pacific Ocean at the U.S. Army's Reagan
Test Site in the Kwajalein Atoll, then released the booster at approximately
1:01 p.m. EDT (1701 GMT) to begin an eight-minute ascent to orbit.
The three-stage rocket
successfully delivered the Communication/Navigation Outage Forecasting System
(C/NOFS) spacecraft into an elliptical orbit with a high point of about 525
miles and a low point of 250 miles, with an inclination traveling 13 degrees
north and south of the equator.
"Everything went
extremely well," Col. Stephen Hargis, director of the DoD Space Test
Program, said in a post-launch telephone interview from Kwajalein.
The launch marked the 25th
consecutive successful flight for the Pegasus over the past decade.
"Pegasus continues to
prove that it ss the most reliable and versatile small launcher in the world
today, with another successful mission supporting an important Air Force
program," said Ron Grabe, Orbital's executive vice president and general
manager of its Launch Systems Group.
From its orbit hugging the
equator, the C/NOFS satellite and its onboard instruments will measure the space
environment to increase warning times for conditions that cause outages of
ultra-high frequency (UHF) communications and degrade Global
Positioning System navigation signals.
"There's a lot of key
areas in the equatorial region that our warfighters have to live and be
successful in, and they cannot have a situation where their GPS and UHF comms
are going out on them without them knowing it," Hargis said.
"So this system will
help improve the forecasting of those outages by approximately four-to-six
hours more time."
The disturbances in the
ionosphere are called scintillations. C/NOFS will be the first space-based
system to predict when such disruptions of critical communications may occur.
"It will help both in
an adversarial and defensive way, in also knowing the enemy's comm and
navigation could possibly be out due to these scintillations," program
manager Capt. Pamela Jessen said from Kwajalein.
"I
believe C/NOFS will have a huge impact on the battlefield and help bring more
of our troops home alive," Hargis said.
C/NOFS is a joint project
of the DoD Space Test Program, Space and Missile Center's Space Development and
Test Wing and the Air Force Research Laboratory. General Dynamics built the
satellite.
"It is an experiment,
so AFRL is going to be running the payload, receiving the data and processing
it and passing that to the warfighter," Hargis said.
Controllers plan to spend
the next month checking out the satellite before a 12-month data collection
mission commences to determine if the satellite instruments can help forecast
the onset of the communication outages.
The combined cost of the
satellite development and construction, the Pegasus rocket and the 13 months of
in-space operations total about $135 million, Hargis said.
It was a long road to get
C/NOFS assembled and launched. Original plans called for the craft to fly
several years ago.
"The biggest challenge
we had a few years back was a solar panel design issue that caused the needing
to go back and redesign and rebuild the solar panels. So that slowed down the
program," Hargis said.
"The technological
challenge on the spacecraft was these instruments are very, very sensitive to
RF noise and radiation. So you have to design a satellite that is very, very
quiet in terms of RF. That was a big technical challenge of the program.
They've overcome everything and it's on-orbit now."
Wednesday's launch was the
39th for the Pegasus rocket and the second to originate
from Kwajalein. The mobility of the air-launched booster has enabled
Orbital to conduct flights from various sites, including Edwards Air Force Base
and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, Kennedy Space Center and Cape
Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and
Gran Canaria of the Canary Islands off Africa.
The C/NOFS satellite was built
in Gilbert, Arizona, then delivered to Vandenberg where it was attached to the
Pegasus rocket at Orbital's facilities there. The rocket was mated to the
L-1011 aircraft and flown to Kwajalein about 10 days ago.
The far-away Kwajalein
location, known for its role as a missile test range, was selected as the
launch site because of its proximity to the equator and the targeted orbit for
the C/NOFS satellite.
"It takes a couple of
days to get here and it's not easy to get in and out of the island. But once
you're here, the Reagan Test Site has just been fantastic, everything we
needed," Hargis said.
The next scheduled Pegasus
mission will use Kwajalein too. A July 15 launch is planned for NASA's
Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX satellite, that will study the
interaction between the solar wind and the interstellar medium.
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