The Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) is a

Ballistic Missile Defense Organization The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) was an agency of the United States Department of Defense that began on 20 May 1974 with the responsibility for all U.S. ballistic missile defense efforts. It was renamed the Missile Defense Age ...

(BMDO) satellite experiment (

unmanned space mission A robotic spacecraft is an uncrewed spacecraft, usually under telerobotic control. A robotic spacecraft designed to make scientific research measurements is often called a space probe. Many space missions are more suited to telerobotic rather ...

) to map bright

infrared Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from around ...

sources in space. MSX offered the first system demonstration of technology in space to identify and track ballistic missiles during their midcourse flight phase.

History

On 24 April 1996, the BMDO launched the MSX satellite on a Delta II booster from

Vandenberg AFB Vandenberg Space Force Base , previously Vandenberg Air Force Base, is a United States Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California. Established in 1941, Vandenberg Space Force Base is a space launch base, launching spacecraft from th ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. MSX was placed in a sun-synchronous orbit at 898 km and an inclination of 99.16 degrees. MSX's mission was to gather data in three spectral bands (long wavelength infrared, visible, and ultraviolet). From 13 May 1998, MSX became a contributing sensor to the Space Surveillance Network.

Launch debris incident

Lottie Williams was exercising in a park in Tulsa on January 22, 1997, when she was hit in the shoulder by a piece of blackened metallic material. U.S., Space Command confirmed that a used Delta II rocket from the April 1996 launch of the Midcourse Space Experiment had crashed into the atmosphere 30 minutes earlier. The object tapped her on the shoulder and fell off harmlessly onto the ground. Williams collected the item and NASA tests later showed that the fragment was consistent with the materials of the rocket, and Nicholas Johnson, the agency's chief scientist for orbital debris, believes that she was indeed hit by a piece of the rocket.;

Operations

Operational from 1996 to 1997, MSX mapped the

galactic plane The galactic plane is the plane on which the majority of a disk-shaped galaxy's mass lies. The directions perpendicular to the galactic plane point to the galactic poles. In actual usage, the terms ''galactic plane'' and ''galactic poles'' usual ...

and areas either missed or identified as particularly bright by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) at wavelengths of 4.29 μm, 4.35 μm, 8.28 μm, 12.13 μm, 14.65 μm, and 21.3 μm. It carried the 33-cm SPIRIT III infrared telescope and interferometer–spectrometer with solid hydrogen-cooled five line-scanned infrared focal plane arrays.The Spatial Infrared Imaging Telescope III (SPIRIT III)
/ref> Alpha Centauri MSX

Calibration In measurement technology and metrology, calibration is the comparison of measurement values delivered by a device under test with those of a calibration standard of known accuracy. Such a standard could be another measurement device of kno ...

of MSX posed a challenge for designers of the experiment, as baselines did not exist for the bands it would be observing under. Engineers solved the problem by having MSX fire projectiles of known composition in front of the detector, and calibrating the instruments to the known black-body curves of the objects. The MSX calibration serves as the basis for other satellites working in the same wavelength range, including

AKARI Akari (ASTRO-F) was an infrared astronomy satellite developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, in cooperation with institutes of Europe and Korea. It was launched on 21 February 2006, at 21:28 UTC (06:28, 22 February JST) by M-V rocke ...

(2006-2011) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST). MSX data is currently available in the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) provided by NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC). Collaborative efforts between the

Air Force Research Laboratory The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is a scientific research organization operated by the United States Air Force Materiel Command dedicated to leading the discovery, development, and integration of aerospace warfighting technologies, pl ...

and IPAC has resulted in an archive containing images for about 15 percent of the sky, including the entire Galactic Plane, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and regions of the sky missed by IRAS.Spitzer Space Telescope at IPAC
/ref>

Notes

External links

The Midcourse Space Experiment Point Source Catalog Version 2.3 Explanatory Guide
From VizieR Catalogue Service
The Spatial Infrared Imaging Telescope III (SPIRIT III)
an instrument for MSX
Welcome to the MSX Showcase
{{Orbital launches in 1996 Space telescopes Infrared telescopes Spacecraft launched in 1996 Spacecraft launched by Delta II rockets

History

Launch debris incident

Operations

See also

Notes

External links