SBIRS barb warning qualification shipped to Cape Canaveral
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: Mar 6, 2011
The initial dedicated satellite for a U.S. Air Force’s SBIRS next-generation barb warning complement arrived during a Florida launch site final week to ready for liftoff on an Atlas 5 rocket in early May.
The SBIRS GEO 1 satellite was installed in a ride enclosure during Lockheed Martin’s booster bureau in Sunnyvale, Calif. Credit: Lockheed Martin Corp.
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The $1.3 billion satellite will detect barb launches with ultra-sensitive staring and scanning infrared sensors from an altitude of 22,300 miles.
The initial of during slightest 4 Space-Based Infrared System satellites streamer for geosynchronous orbit, a qualification flew aboard an Air Force C-5 load qualification Thursday from a Lockheed Martin Corp. trickery in California to Cape Canaveral, Fla.
The conveyance was dual days before an Atlas 5 rocket bloody off with a Air Force’s second X-37B space plane. The SBIRS load is subsequent in line for a Atlas rocket during Cape Canaveral.
Launch of a SBIRS GEO 1 satellite is scheduled for May 5.
“Shipment of SBIRS GEO 1 is a covenant to a clever supervision and attention partnership, and a tough work and loyalty of a whole SBIRS team. We sojourn focused on achieving goal success for this vicious program,” pronounced Col. Roger Teague, executive of a Air Force’s infrared space systems directorate. “GEO 1 will play a critical purpose in a inhabitant confidence space architecture, and we demeanour brazen to removing this satellite on-orbit.”
The satellite will be prepared for launch inside Cape Canaveral’s former Defense Satellite Communications System, or DSCS, estimate facility. The Air Force upgraded a facility’s infrastructure and built a new entrance highway heading from a base’s runway.
The SBIRS GEO 1 satellite was unloaded from an Air Force C-5 load qualification after it arrived during Cape Canaveral. Credit: Lockheed Martin Corp.
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The car-sized booster will bear preflight testing, fueling and be encapsulated inside a Atlas rocket’s 13.1-foot-diameter load shroud.
Workers will ride a satellite inside a rocket’s nose to a Atlas Vertical Integration Facility during Complex 41 in late Apr for final integrated testing.
The rocket will hurl to a launch pad a day before liftoff.
The Atlas 5 launcher will fly in a supposed 401 configuration, denoting a 4-meter load fairing, no strap-on plain rocket boosters and a single-engine Centaur top stage.
Lockheed Martin is building during slightest 4 SBIRS satellites to fly in geosynchronous orbit. The Air Force could sequence some-more SBIRS GEO craft.
Northrop Grumman Corp. provides a SBIRS program’s infrared sensor technology.
Two SBIRS sensor suites are mounted on personal National Reconnaissance Office satellites in elliptical Molniya-type orbits over a Earth’s poles.
The SBIRS module follows a Air Force’s Defense Support Program, that launched a final satellite in 2007.
“GEO 1 smoothness to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station represents a program’s many poignant miracle to date, and we am unapproachable of a whole SBIRS group dedicated to delivering this slicing corner barb warning spacecraft,” pronounced Jeff Smith, Lockheed Martin’s SBIRS clamp boss and module director. “When GEO 1 is launched, announced operational and a information is fused into a DSP and HEO constellation, SBIRS will broach unprecedented, global, persistent, infrared notice capabilities to a republic for decades to come.”
