Mar 16 2009
From The Space Library
NASA announced the selection of Colorado-based United Launch Alliance to launch two payloads for NASA’s SMD and two for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, under a NASA Launch Services contract. The US$600 million award stipulated that the four payloads— the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission, the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, and the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites K and L (TDRS-K and TDRS-L) missions— would launch aboard Atlas-V expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station]] in Florida. NASA planned to launch the RBSP mission in 2011, as part of its Living with a Star Program. The RBSP mission would use two nearly identical spacecraft, which would study Earth’s radiation belts for two years, helping scientists understand how the Sun’s changing energy flow affects the radiation belts. Planned for 2014, the MMS mission, part of the SMD Heliophysics Division Solar Terrestrial Probes Program, would launch four identical satellites together in a stacked formation. Traveling around Earth in an elliptical orbit, the MMS mission satellites would study the fundamental plasma-physics processes of magnetic reconnection that occur when energy emanating from the Sun’s solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field. NASA planned to launch TDRS-K and TDRS-L in 2012 and 2013, to replenish the NASA communications relay network that provides voice, data, video, and telemetry links between the ground and spacecraft below geosynchronous orbit. The ISS and NASA’s HST use the NASA communications relay network.
NASA, “NASA Awards Launch Services Contract for Four Missions,” news release C09-011, 16 March 2009, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/mar/HQ_C09-011_Launch_Services.html (accessed 4 May 2011); Robert Block, “NASA Contracts Science Missions on ULA’s Atlas V Rockets,” Orlando Sentinel (FL), 17 March 2009.
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