Jul 11 1978
From The Space Library
NASA announced it had selected General Electric Co., Valley Forge, Pa., to provide a Landsat-D mission system consisting of a flight segment (and backup) and a ground segment that would include a data management system, an operations control center, a Landsat assessment system, and a transportable ground station, all to be managed by GSFC. General Electric would fabricate the mission-unique equipment and integrate and test the flight segments, as well as build and install the ground segment in government facilities. Proposed cost of the cost-plus-award-fee contract was approximately $70.5 million, to cover the Landsat-D launch in late 1981 and early orbital operations.
The thematic mapper (TM) in Landsat-D's instrument module, a second-generation 7-band multispectral scanning radiometer with a ground resolution of about 30m (100ft), could extend the inventorying of earth resources. NASA had designed Landsat-D to improve activities such as crop forecasting, vegetation-health assessment, forest- and range-resources management, water-resources management, land-use mapping, and mineral exploration. (NASA Release 78-102)
ESA announced that Europe's first comsat, Ots 2, had been operating correctly at the end of the 8-wk period covered by an insurance contract.
Ots 2, launched May 12 from Cape Canaveral, had reached its final station 35 900km above the equator at 10°E. Its six SHF antennas would cover western Europe, the Middle East, north Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Madeira, and Iceland. Ots 2 had successfully exchanged signals with four large earth stations and eight stations equipped with small antennas. Checks and preliminary tests would continue until the end of September, when ESA would turn over Ots 2 to its users, national telecommunications administrations grouped in interim Eutelsat and European research units and centers. The experimental program would include telephone and television traffic-routing tests, propagation experiments, and a variety of experiments related to new comsat applications in Europe. (ESA Release July 11/78)
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