Discoverer 25, also known as Corona 9017, was an American optical
reconnaissance satellite which was launched in 1961. It was the fifth of ten
Corona KH-2 satellites, based on the
Agena-B.
The launch of Discoverer 25 occurred at 23:02 UTC on 16 June 1961. A
Thor DM-21 Agena-B rocket was used, flying from Launch Complex 75-1-1 at the
Vandenberg Air Force Base Vandenberg may refer to:
* Vandenberg (surname), including a list of people with the name
* USNS ''General Hoyt S. Vandenberg'' (T-AGM-10), transport ship in the United States Navy, sank as an artificial reef in Key West, Florida
* Vandenberg Sp ...
.
Upon successfully reaching orbit, it was assigned the Harvard designation 1961 Xi 1.
Discoverer 25 was operated in a
low Earth orbit
A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with a period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial objects in outer space are in LEO, with an altitude never mor ...
, with a
perigee
An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. For example, the apsides of the Earth are called the aphelion and perihelion.
General description
There are two apsides in any ell ...
of , an
apogee
An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. For example, the apsides of the Earth are called the aphelion and perihelion.
General description
There are two apsides in any ell ...
of , 82.1 degrees of
inclination
Orbital inclination measures the tilt of an object's orbit around a celestial body. It is expressed as the angle between a reference plane and the orbital plane or axis of direction of the orbiting object.
For a satellite orbiting the Eart ...
, and a
period
Period may refer to:
Common uses
* Era, a length or span of time
* Full stop (or period), a punctuation mark
Arts, entertainment, and media
* Period (music), a concept in musical composition
* Periodic sentence (or rhetorical period), a concept ...
of 90.4 minutes.
The satellite had a mass of ,
and was equipped with a
panoramic camera
Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as ''wide format photography''. The term has also been applied to ...
with a
focal length of , which had a maximum resolution of .
Images were recorded onto film, and returned in a Satellite Recovery Vehicle two days after launch. The Satellite Recovery Vehicle used by Discoverer 25 was SRV-510. Once its images had been returned, Discoverer 25's mission was complete, and it remained in orbit until it
decayed on 12 July 1961.
The Satellite Recovery Vehicle was designed to be recovered in mid-air by a
Fairchild C-119J Flying Boxcar aircraft. As SRV-510 descended, the C-119J was unable to capture it, and the capsule had to be recovered at sea after it landed. The film it returned was affected by streaks across images.
References
Spacecraft launched in 1961
Spacecraft which reentered in 1961
{{US-spacecraft-stub