Ball Aerospace commercialise a design for geostationary STORM

Tempus Global, a commercial venture that aims to perform hyperspectral sounding from geostationary orbit, has contracted with Ball Aerospace to build sensors that would be hosted on third-party satellites. 

Credit: Tempus Global

Tempus Global Data, the Ogden, Utah-based firm that last year took over an effort to commercialize a Utah State University design for a geostationary-orbiting weather sensor, has contracted with Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. to build eight copies of the sensor, the company announced in a Jan. 7 press release.

Under the arrangement, Ball would build six Sounding & Tracking Observatory for Regional Meteorology (STORM) sensors to fly as hosted payloads on geostationary satellites, and possibly two more that would fly on dedicated satellites, Tempus said in its press release.

Financial terms of the deal, under which Utah State would support Ball’s effort, were not disclosed.

Tempus spokesman Mark Hurst said the company has “closed an initial round” of financing for its ambitious project but declined to provide details.

“Our target date for first launch is early 2018. We don’t have a specific start date on building STORM 1 but it is roughly a three year build for the first sensor,” Hurst wrote in a Jan. 14 email.

The STORM sensor was originally developed by Utah State for a U.S. government mission that ultimately was canceled.

Tempus emerged as the university’s commercialisation partner last year after a similar arrangement with GeoMetWatch, which hoped to deploy a global network of STORM sensors and sell the data to weather agencies and other organizations, collapsed in acrimony.

The first STORM sensor was supposed to fly as a hosted payload aboard a satellite owned by AsiaSat of Hong Kong, but that deal fell through after GeoMetWatch was unable to secure the necessary financing in time to meet the satellite’s production schedule.

In a separate press release issued Jan. 13, Tempus said it had entered into a strategic partnership with Science and Technology Corp. (STC) of Silver Spring, Maryland, to develop STORM data products.

STC is a technology company whose government clients include the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) weather satellite and National Weather Service divisions.

NASA NPP Runs the Gauntlet of Environmental Testing

The NPP satellite sits surrounded by 144 rock concert speakers. They're stacked in a circle 16 feet high in a testing room at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado.

As engineers set up for the environmental test, Pink Floyd's song "Money" plays gently in the background.

The music stops. The room clears. Then the sound engineer wearing earplugs and headphones in the control room next door flips a switch.

Slowly, the noise of thousands of pounds of exploding rocket fuel builds louder and louder until it blasts the satellite at a deafening 143.6 decibels -- loud enough to cause serious damage and pain to unprotected ears.

"I was outside the building when they did the full level acoustics," says Glenn Iona, NPP Chief Engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "and I could feel the ground shaking."

The acoustic test is one of a gauntlet of environmental tests a satellite must pass to prove that it can survive launch and life in space. For Large Class Observatory mission NPP, this process took years to plan, 15 months to execute and was fraught with as many engineering challenges as building the satellite itself.

The NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) is the prototype for the next generation of Earth-observing satellites that will monitor daily weather and long-term ozone levels and climate change.

NPP's five instruments will continue data collection now done by an aging fleet of satellites. NASA's oldest Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites are more than 10 years old, with instrument designs and technology dating back to the early 1990s.

NPP is the bridge between the original EOS missions and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). JPSS, previously called the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), will be developed by NASA for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Testing to evaluate whether a satellite is ready for space occurs at several levels. Some individual parts and each individual instrument from the satellite go through three types of testing: dynamic, electromagnetic compatibility, and thermal vacuum.

Then the parts are integrated onto the main satellite bus, a wedge-shaped block the size of a four-door sedan. The bus has propulsion systems, a flight computer, a data processing computer, data storage and a solar panel wing that powers it all.

Engineers then put the spacecraft and instruments through their paces to get a performance baseline before the whole satellite is run through the suite of environmental tests again.

A Perfect STORRM

NASA and its industry partners Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., successfully demonstrated a new sensor technology that will make it easier and safer for spacecraft to rendezvous and dock to the International Space Station.

This new docking navigation system prototype consists of an eye-safe lidar Vision Navigation Sensor, or VNS, a high-definition docking camera, as well as the avionics and flight software. Both sensors will provide real-time three-dimensional images to the crew with a resolution 16 times higher than the current space shuttle sensors.

This next generation system also provides data from as far away as three miles - three times the range of the current shuttle navigation sensor.

"You are looking at the future of rendezvous and docking right here," said David L. Taylor, president and CEO of Ball Aerospace, as he welcomed dozens of NASA and industry engineers to the demonstration.

The hardware will be tested by astronauts aboard STS-134, the last planned shuttle mission, currently scheduled for February 2011, as part of the Sensor Test for Orion Relative Navigation Risk Mitigation (STORRM) Development Test Objective (DTO).