Nov 22 1977
From The Space Library
NASA launched the ESA Meteosat at 8:35pm EST from the Eastern Test Range on a Delta vehicle into asynchronous transfer orbit with 37 001km apogee, 147km perigee, and 27.5° inclination. The apogee boost motor fired at 1:19 pm EST Nov. 23 to begin maneuvering it to a position on the Greenwich meridian at 0° longitude above the equator, where it would provide long-range forecasting coverage to Europe, the Near East, and Africa for at least 3yr.
The cylindrical craft 3.2m long and 2.1m in diameter weighed 697kg at launch and 300kg in orbit; its payload was a telescope radiometer to observe earth and cloud formations, providing relay and transmission of meteorological data. The World Meteorological Organization had set up a chain of 5 such satellites, 1 European, 1 Soviet, 1 Japanese, and 2 U.S. Besides transmitting to user stations the data from a center at Darmstadt, West Germany, Meteosat would relay Atlantic Ocean images from the U.S. Goes. (NASA Release 77-230; MOR M-492-102-77-01 [prelaunch] Nov 16/77, [postlaunch] Feb 28/78; KSC Spaceport News Nov 11/77,1; ESA releases Nov 3/77, Nov 16/77, Nov 23/77)
MSFC announced it had awarded to Martin Marietta Corp. a $1.735 million contract for analysis and design activities needed for a preliminary design review in March 1978 of the teleoperator retrieval system(TRS).
MSFC had been managing development of the TRS to adjust the orbit of Skylab [see Nov. 2], based on in-house, NASA studies and earlier work by Martin Marietta on the astronaut-maneuvering unit and a free-flying teleoperator system. The contractor would make wide use of already qualified hardware in preparing for TRS assembly, test, and integration. (MSFC Release 77-220)
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