Spartan 207
The IAE is an inflatable antenna 14 meters in diameter which is mounted on
three 28m struts. The struts are attached to the Spartan spacecraft, which
were deployed and then recovered by the Shuttle. Once in low-Earth orbit, the
Spartan became a platform for the antenna which, once inflated in space, was
roughly the size of a tennis court. An optical system surveyed the antenna and
measured the accuracy of the surface at a variety of internal pressures and
thermal conditions. The antenna was developed by L'Garde Inc., of Tustin, CA, a
small aerospace business, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of
Pasadena, CA, under NASA's In-Space Technology Experiments Program., or
IN-STEP.
The IAE experiment is meant to lay the groundwork for future technology
development in inflatable space structures, which will be launched and then
inflated like a balloon on-orbit. SP207/IAE will validate the deployment
(inflation) and performance of a large inflatable antenna during a
ninety-minute mission before jettisoning the antenna structure and recovering
the Spartan spacecraft at mission end. The inflation process will be captured
by the crew on the nearby Shuttle, using a variety of still cameras, a motion
picture camera, and video cameras. The on-orbit performance of the antenna
(surface accuracy) will be determined by illuminating the antenna surface with
light panels mounted on the Spartan and capturing the resulting patterns on
video recorders onboard the Spartan. These will be analyzed after the Spartan
is returned to Earth by the Space Shuttle.
IAE was ejected from Spartan once the experiment has completed (just the
Spartan carrier with the experiment recorders was returned to the cargo bay).
This is the same carrier as for
Spartan 201-2
Out
of service
|
May
1996
|
Cause
|
Retrieved
by NASA (IAE burned up into atmosphere on 22 May)
|
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