Dale Ireland wrote: > > why did Starshine 3 go up before starshine 2? Hi Dale and list, Starshine 3 should have been launched after Starshine 2. BUT, in December 2000, NASA urgently needed a new primary payload for the Kodiak Star mission that was to be launched at the end of August 2001. The original payload ran into technical and cost problems. NASA offered Starshine to be the primary payload but without changing the launch schedule. So we had to design and build Starshine 3 in a hurry (8 months from approval to completion, almost a record !) and launch a mirror polishing campaign immediately following the one for Starshine 2. Thanks to the efforts of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and all the Starshine partners, we were able to meet the deadline. The next Starshine will be no 4 and 5 to be launched at the same time from the payload bay of the shuttle on mission STS-114 in January 2003. They will be of the same size ( 48 cm dia.) but with different masses giving them a different ballistic coefficient. A nice experiment in orbital mechanics ! Dan -- Daniel Deak representant, projet spatial Starshine L'Avenir, Quebec COSPAR site 1747 : 45.7275°N, 72.3526°W, 191 m., UTC-5:00 Site en francais sur les satellites: French-language satellite web site : http://www.obsat.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Dec 20 2001 - 10:53:45 EST