18 April 2007: AeroAstro has reported that STPSat-1 successfully completed Normal Operations Readiness Review (NORR), conducted on 28 March at the Space Development and Test Wing (SDTW) at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico.
The NORR marked completion of the on-orbit checkout period that began with STPSat-1’s launch on 8 March from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas V rocket. STPSat-1’s primary experiment, Spatial Heterodyne Imager for Mesospheric Radicals (SHIMMER), is a high-resolution ultraviolet spectrometer based on the new optical technique known as Spatial Heterodyne Spectroscopy (SHS). SHS facilitates the design of low mass, low power, high throughout spectrometers for space-based remote sensing. The secondary experiment, the Computerized Ionospheric Tomography Receiver in Space (CITRIS), is investigating irregularities that affect propagation of satellite-to-ground links for GPS and communications.
“The STPSat-1 checkout period was accomplished rapidly and smoothly.” said Richard Barnisin, AeroAstro’s STPSat-1 Program Manager, and Vice President of Space Programs. “Most of the subsystems are performing even better than predicted, and we’ve confirmed that the experiments are getting good data. The launch sequence and final orbit were near-perfect, providing further verification that the EELV Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA) is a viable secondary launch alternative.”
