Amilitary satellite designed to demonstrate inexpensive user-friendly spacetechnologies is being readied for launch from Virginia's Eastern Shore onTuesday night.
TacSat 3 is tuckedinside the pointy end of a Minotaur 1 booster, a space launcherformed by combining the two lower stages of a retired Minuteman missile and thetwo upper stages of the Pegasus and Taurus rockets built by Orbital SciencesCorp.
Engineers examined theMinotaur's payload fairing to make sure Tuesday's $88 million launch would not sufferthe same fate as the February flight of a Taurus rocket that was broughtdown when its nose cone failed to jettison.
"Certainly there was areason to go look at that," said Air Force Col. Scott Handy, missiondirector for the launch.
Officials exonerated thefairing's frangible rails in the Taurus failure. A similar system is used bythe Minotaur 1.
"Those particularrails go along the base of the fairing as well as around the exterior so thatthe two fairing halves can actually separate at the time during themission," Handy said.
"We have no reason todoubt the expected separation of the fairing as designed," Handy said.
Conceived in 2004 andoriginally scheduled to launch in 2007, TacSat 3 has endured several years ofdelays due to problems with spacecraft equipment, including the satellite'sstar tracker, flight software and avionics system.
The 880-pound satellite ismanaged by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.It is part of the Department of Defense's Operationally Responsive Spaceprogram, which aims to develop, test and integrate low-cost space technologiesonto tactical battlefields.
"We hope to chart afundamentally new paradigm of space support for the military," said TomCooley, TacSat 3 program manager.
"The TacSat program isa stepping stone for delivering operationally relevant space capabilities tojoint force commanders, all the while inserting mature technologies thatsupport our national security interests," said Peter Wegner, director ofthe ORS office.
TacSat 3's primaryinstrument is a high-resolution hyperspectral imager called ARTEMIS, whichstands for the Advanced Responsive Tactically Effective Military ImagingSpectrometer.
Precursor hyperspectralimagers have flown on airborne and satellite platforms. The Hyperion instrumentwas launched in 2000 aboard NASA's Earth Observing 1 remote sensing testsatellite.
"When the satellitebreaks the horizon, the commander is able to uplink the location that they'reinterested in. The satellite autonomously calculates how to make thatcollection with the best advantage, collects it, processes the data on board,and compares the data that's collected to spectra that the Army is interestedin," Cooley said.
Programmers will load thespectra, or the signature of light reflected from objects on the ground, on thesatellite's computers so they can automatically compare target information tofiles stored on-board.
"There is a library ofspectra that are pre-loaded on the satellite. They might say, for instance,they're looking for a particular type of paint. We have the spectra of thatpaint on the satellite," Cooley said.
Commanders on the groundwill receive raw imagery or a text message with the latitude and longitude ofthe object's location, according to Cooley.
"We'll just basicallysit back and watch how useful it was to them and what the impact was,"Wegner said.
The satellite also carriesthe Navy's Satellite Communications Package and an Air Force plug-and-playavionics package called the Space Avionics Experiment.
"By the end of thatfirst year, we're going to have a really good assessment of the operationalutility of this kind of system," Wegner said.
"Our goal is that thetechnology will be of sufficient interest that the DOD will elect to moveforward and transition this type of technology into their toolbox, but thatremains to be seen," Cooley said.
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