Spartan 201 Satellite
After a week of ground-based communications antennas, test vehicles and the like, here's some genuine space hardware with multiple flights to its credit.
This is the original Spartan flight instrument, which was carried into space five times in the Shuttle payload bay (you can see a badge depicting five Shuttle silhouettes attached to the vehicle) and deployed for the duration of each mission into a parallel orbit with Shuttle. The programme was created by NASA in the 1980s to replace its sub-orbital sounding rocket programme.
The scientific payloads for Spartan therefore were of the same order as those formerly carried aloft by Aerobees and other sounding rockets. This retrievable system as presently instrumented houses an ultra-violet coronagraph from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a white light coronagraph from the Goddard Space Flight Center. These devices use internal and external means of occulting the solar photosphere to reveal the structure of the sun's faint outer atmosphere. They and other similar instruments studied the solar corona on five separate occasions and played a part in numerous Shuttle exercises.
This particular configuration was reassembled by Swales, Inc., under NASA contract, for display at the Udvar-Hazy Center in 2003. It hangs from the ceiling in the Space Science section of the James S McDonnell Space Hangar.
Spartan 201 Satellite
After a week of ground-based communications antennas, test vehicles and the like, here's some genuine space hardware with multiple flights to its credit.
This is the original Spartan flight instrument, which was carried into space five times in the Shuttle payload bay (you can see a badge depicting five Shuttle silhouettes attached to the vehicle) and deployed for the duration of each mission into a parallel orbit with Shuttle. The programme was created by NASA in the 1980s to replace its sub-orbital sounding rocket programme.
The scientific payloads for Spartan therefore were of the same order as those formerly carried aloft by Aerobees and other sounding rockets. This retrievable system as presently instrumented houses an ultra-violet coronagraph from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a white light coronagraph from the Goddard Space Flight Center. These devices use internal and external means of occulting the solar photosphere to reveal the structure of the sun's faint outer atmosphere. They and other similar instruments studied the solar corona on five separate occasions and played a part in numerous Shuttle exercises.
This particular configuration was reassembled by Swales, Inc., under NASA contract, for display at the Udvar-Hazy Center in 2003. It hangs from the ceiling in the Space Science section of the James S McDonnell Space Hangar.