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Wallops Flight Facility Being Recognized By MicroSat Systems
Date: 11/29/2007
Description:
Wallops Flight Facility Being Recognized By MicroSat Systems
Littleton, Colorado, November 29th, 2007…. Today MicroSat Systems (MSI) recognized the Wallops Flight Facility for their support of the TacSat-2 satellite launch nearly a year ago on December 16, 2006. The ceremony was held at the Wallops NASA Visitor Center and Museum.
NASA and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport were recognized for supporting the successful launch of the TacSat-2 satellite aboard an Air Force Minotaur 1 rocket. This launch was the first orbital launch from Wallops since 1995 ending a twelve year hiatus. MSI, developers of the spacecraft bus, presented to Wallops a scale model of TacSat-2 that will be displayed in the Wallops museum as well as showed the video of the TacSat-2 launch. Presenting from MSI was President, John Roth and Director of Advanced Systems, Dr. Todd Mosher. Accepting the model on behalf of Wallops was NASA Wallops Director John Campbell, NASA TacSat-2 Project Manager Ron Walsh and Spaceport Manager Rick Baldwin.
“MSI is pleased to present NASA Wallops the scale model of the TacSat-2 Satellite it designed and built,” said President John Roth. “In helping with the successful launch, Wallops not only helped launch our satellite, they also helped launch our company.”
TacSat-2 Background/Current Status
The TacSat-2 program was the first flight demonstration program under the Operationally Responsive Space initiative and featured 11 onboard experiments. Sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the successful December 16, 2006 launch of TacSat-2 was MicroSat System’s inaugural mission and demonstrated the ability to provide a high performance small satellite for a very competitive price with a challenging schedule. MicroSat designed, built, and environmentally qualified the satellite bus with a 59% payload mass fraction and delivered the basic bus structure to AFRL in 12 months. MSI also built the primary solar arrays and the experimental thin-film solar arrays. The microsatellite bus is operating normally and has surpassed the flight lifetime requirement (completing its eleventh month of flight operations in November). MicroSat Systems and their contractor, Advanced Solutions Inc., continue to support Air Force mission operations from their Littleton, Colorado facilities. Tacsat-2 was recently recognized with the Aviation Week and Space Technology Magazine Small Company Product Breakthrough Award for its Tacsat-2 success.
About MicroSat Systems, Inc. offers high performance microsatellites and spacecraft subsystems including; space power systems, advanced miniaturized avionics and lightweight composite structures, to government and commercial customers. MicroSat is currently building the Demonstration and Science Experiment (DSX) spacecraft for the Air Force and is also developing advanced spacecraft subsystems in thin-film solar arrays, plug and play avionics and lightweight structures.
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