Orbital Sciences Corporation announced today that it has been selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for an $8.3
million contract to design, build and test the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor satellite (ACRIMSAT). The spacecraft will be based on the company’s flight-proven MiniStar satellite platform. Under the contract, Orbital’s responsibilities include the integration of the JPL- supplied ACRIM instrument with the spacecraft bus, the performance of environmental testing and the supply of a ground station to JPL. In addition to the satellite and ground segment of the ACRIMSAT program,
NASA is considering Orbital’s Pegasus rocket to launch the satellite in 1999.
Mr. Robert R. Lovell, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Orbital’s Space Systems Group, said, “We are
delighted that NASA selected us to build the ACRIMSAT satellite and are anxious to make another important contribution to
the national space agency’s study of planet Earth. Our extensive involvement in the ACRIMSAT program, as the supplier of the
satellite, ground station and possibly the launch vehicle, reinforces the success of Orbital’s corporate strategy of offering fully
integrated space technology capabilities to the space industry.”
ACRIMSAT’s five-year mission to perform solar observations is part of the Earth Observing System (EOS), which is central to
NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth initiative. EOS is made up of a science segment, a data system, and a space segment that
includes a series of polar-orbiting and low-inclination satellites that perform long-term observations of the Earth that NASA
expects to continue for a minimum of 15 years. EOS will enable multidisciplinary study of the Earth’s interrelated, life-enabling
processes, involving the atmosphere, oceans, land surfaces and polar regions.
The spacecraft bus on which ACRIMSAT will be based exceeds the program’s design requirements resulting in high reliability
over its five-year mission. It uses a single processor suite, that has already flown on half a dozen satellites, to govern such
mission-critical areas as attitude control, communications, and payload data and telemetry acquisition and storage.
Communications between the satellite and the JPL-operated ground station at Table Mountain Observatory in Wrightwood,
CA, will be accomplished using previously flown S-band transmitters. Nearly one megabyte of science data will be downlinked
every day, along with spacecraft state-of-health telemetry. Orbital will train JPL personnel in operations of the satellite during
the spacecraft’s on-orbit testing phase.
