Launched June 18, 2009, with its primary mission scheduled to end September 2010, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will be the first observatory ever to spend an entire year orbiting and observing the Moon at a low altitude of just 50 km. The spacecraft carries a wide variety of scientific instruments and will provide an extraordinary opportunity to study the lunar landscape at resolutions and over time scales never achieved before. This paper is intended as a companion to the series of papers released simultaneously in this journal detailing LRO's instruments and their planned measurements. The paper describes the design and key performance drivers of the LRO spacecraft and overall mission design. It presents a comprehensive description of the operation of the various systems that comprise the spacecraft and illustrates how these systems enable achievement of the mission requirements.
The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission is the fourth mission of the Solar Terrestrial Probe (STP) program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The MMS mission was launched on March 12, 2015. The MMS mission consists of four identically instrumented spin-stabilized observatories which are flown in formation to perform the first definitive study of magnetic reconnection in space. The MMS mission was presented with numerous technical challenges, including the simultaneous construction and launch of four identical large spacecraft with 100 instruments total, stringent electromagnetic cleanliness requirements, closed-loop precision maneuvering and pointing of spinning flexible spacecraft, on-board GPS based orbit determination far above the GPS constellation, and a flight dynamics design that enables formation flying with separation distances as small as 10 km. This paper describes the overall mission design and presents an overview of the design, testing, and early on-orbit operation of the spacecraft systems and instrument suite.
This paper describes the IRIS-GUS upper stage system that will be used to launch NASA's Triana Observatory from the Space Shuttle. Triana is a pathfinder earth science mission being executed on a rapid schedule and small budget, therefore the mission's upper stage solution had to be a system that could be fielded quickly at relatively low cost and risk. The building of the IRIS-GUS system was necessary because NASA lost the capability to launch moderately sized upper stage missions from the Space Shuttle when the PAM-D system was retired. The IRIS-GUS system restores this capability.The resulting system is a hybrid which
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