Alexis

Also called P89-1

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General

Designation	22638 / 93026A
Launch date	23 Apr 1993
Country of origin	United States
Operator	LANL
Mission	Scientific: EUV astronomy
Perigee/Apogee	800 km
Inclination	70°
Period
Launch vehicle	Pegasus #4

Cost: $17 million

Still operational in Aug 2003.

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External resources

http://nis-www.lanl.gov/nis-projects/alexis/

http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/Images/misc_missions/alexis.gif
sat-index articles

When Alexis was launched, a bracket that had been damaged during ground testing broke loose, leaving one of the satellite's four solar panels dangling by only its electrical cabling and throwing off the carefully determined balance of the spin-stabilized spacecraft. When the Alexis team restored contact with the satellite more than two months after launch they discovered that not only did it have a serious wobble, but the spacecraft's magnetometer, which was intended to determine the satellite's orientation by sensing Earth's magnetic field lines, had broken when the solar paddle came loose. The Los Alamos science team and the manufacturers came up with a way to determine the satellite's orientation in May 1994. Since then it has been quite successful.

Alexis was designed to monitored the sky in three narrow energy bands between 0.06 and 0.1 keV; it also carried the Blackbeard experiment to study ionospheric effects on radio transmissions.

Technical data

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Specifications

Prime contractor	Aero Astro Inc
Platform
Mass at launch	115 kg
Mass in orbit
Dimension	1 m high x 0.6 m diameter
Solar array
Stabilization	spin stabilized (2 rpm)
DC power	50 W
Design lifetime	1 year

S-band telemetry & data (2260.5 MHz)

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