A major milestone has been reached in NASA's development of "faster, better, cheaper" space missions with the delivery of the SeaWinds instrument, NASA's next generation El Nino monitoring device that measures wind speed and direction over the world's oceans, to Ball Aerospace in Boulder, CO, for integration into the Quick
Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) satellite.
QuikSCAT is a mission designed to complete turnaround from
conception to orbit in a very short period of time. "One of the real
challenges of this mission is having to do it in a year. The
delivery of the instrument to Ball Aerospace signifies that we are on
schedule and headed to our one-year goal," said Jim Graf, the
QuikSCAT project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),
Pasadena, CA. "This is the first major JPL Earth Science mission to
have a development time of approximately one year, from approval to
launch, since the Explorer 1 satellite in the late 1950s."
The SeaWinds instrument on the QuikSCAT satellite is a
specialized microwave radar that measures both the speed and
direction of winds near the ocean surface. Winds directly affect the
turbulent exchanges of heat, moisture and greenhouse gases between
the atmosphere and the ocean. Changes in the winds along the equator
play a key role in the formation of the El Nino phenomenon in the
Pacific Ocean. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
also is supporting the mission and will use the mission data for
improved weather forecasting and storm warning, helping forecasters
to more accurately determine the paths and intensities of tropical
storms and hurricanes. The versatile instrument also will be used by
climate change researchers, weather forecasters and commercial
shipping interests.
SeaWinds will use a rotating dish antenna with two microwave
beams and will radiate microwaves across 90 percent of the Earth's
ice-free oceans every day. The instrument will collect wind speed
and wind direction data in a continuous 1,118 mile-wide band, making approximately 400,000 measurements each day.
The QuikSCAT satellite mission will restart the ocean-wind data
stream which was lost when the Japanese Advanced Earth Observing
Satellite (ADEOS) with a NASA Scatterometer onboard ceased
functioning on June 30, 1997. Before the loss of ADEOS, NASA was
able to obtain valuable data about summer and winter monsoon seasons
and the onset of the El Nino event.
QuikSCAT is scheduled for launch in November 1998, from
Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA, on a Titan II launch vehicle.
QuikSCAT is the first Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ)
contract for rapid delivery of satellite core-systems. The ID/IQ
procurement method provides NASA a faster, better, cheaper method for
the purchase of satellite systems through a "catalog," allowing for
shorter turnaround time from mission conception to launch. Total
mission costs for QuikSCAT are $93 million.
JPL's NSCAT/SeaWinds Program Office is responsible for SeaWinds
and provides overall project management, as well as science ground
processing systems and the SeaWinds instrument. NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, manages development of the satellite
that is being designed and fabricated by Ball Aerospace and
Technologies Corp. under the ID/IQ procurement method. The QuikSCAT
mission is part of NASA's Earth Sciences enterprise, a long-term
research program designed to study Earth's land, oceans, atmosphere,
ice and life as a total integrated system.
