Revitalizing NASA's Suborbital Program Advancing Science, Driving Innovation, and Developing Workforce (2010) / Chapter Skim
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4 NASA's Sounding Rocket Capabilities
4 NASA's Sounding Rocket Capabilities
Pages 34-47
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From page 34... ...
. The sounding rocket program has a rich history of establishing directions for NASA and often contributing key technology for new major missions and maturing enabling technologies for future flight (e.g., Table 4.1 and Figure 4.1, which shows the launch of a sounding rocket carrying an inflatable re-entry vehicle experiment payload)
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From page 35... ...
Lange/UC Berkeley Spitzer-IRAC Top Hat electrostatic detectors, plasma wave C Carlson/UC Berkeley FAST, Cluster, THEMIS interferometers NOTE: This table is a very incomplete list of technologies first developed using sounding rockets that ultimately were crucial to major NASA missions.
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From page 36... ...
Under-flights, where a sounding rocket observation is made in coordination with a satellite, have provided crucial calibration and validation data for the solar constant, atmospheric constitu ents, and airglow measurements made by orbital instrumentation. The technologies developed for observing the SunEUV multi-layer normal incidence optics, intensified charge-coupled device detectors for the EUV, grazing incidence telescopeswere all used in numerous orbital missions including SOHO, TRACE, STEREO, SDO, and Hinode.
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From page 37... ...
Many early discoveries of solar flare phenomena were made using sounding rockets. -- Gordon Gamire, Evan Pugh Professor, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University The study of auroral phenomena with sounding rockets has a particularly rich history because sounding rockets permit observations at altitudes and other observing conditions unavailable to other platforms (see Figure 4.3)
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From page 38... ...
Management Structure The SRP is managed using a government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) model, whereby management of the infrastructure is led by the NASA Sounding Rocket Program Office and the execution of the individual rocket missions is managed by the competitively selected NASA Sounding Rocket Operations Contract(or)
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From page 39... ...
of all new sounding rockets first occurs at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) in Virginia, which provides the test and fabrication facilities configured specifically to support sounding rockets.
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From page 40... ...
There does not appear to be significant overlap in the observing regimes provided by the national and international facilities, so a loss of any one facility would translate into a loss of capability. 4.2 STATuSEROSION OF A NATIONAL ASSET The sounding rocket program supports leading-edge opportunities for scientific research in geospace and solar research, where in situ measurements at altitudes unreachable by other platforms and solar fluxes unobservable from Earth's surface afford a wealth of opportunity for investigating new phenomena and developing instrumentation.
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From page 41... ...
SOURCE: NASA Sounding Rocket Program Office and NASA Headquarters. in the Future of Space Astronomy"1 that was submitted to the Astro2010 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey.
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From page 42... ...
This flight rate for core missions is more than 30 percent lower than the average flight rate in the decade preceding NSROC, when the average annual flight rate was 28 with nearly annual remote campaigns. 3 The NSROC contract is in year 11 of a 10-year contract.
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From page 43... ...
This places the whole program at serious risk. Sounding Rocket Element of Recommendations 1, 2, and 3: Given that the sounding rocket program has experienced a decline in the flight rate of scientific missions since the inception of the GOCO model, NASA should provide an assessment of the current GOCO model and its impact on the sounding rocket program over the initial 10 years.
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From page 44... ...
SOURCE: NASA Sounding Rocket Program Office. analyze flight data over the course of a week (see Figure 4.7)
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From page 45... ...
With develop ment times of 1 to 3 years, the sounding rocket program is a more efficient training environment than the 5 to 10 years required to develop an orbital mission. The shorter lifecycle of a sounding rocket exposes junior engineers and experimental scientists to the mission lifecycle and the systems engineering discipline in a timely fashion that allows them to carry that experience forward to larger-scale orbital programs.
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From page 46... ...
Sounding Rocket Element of Recommendation 4: NASA should execute a thorough conceptual study of an OSR-type capability to evaluate the technical feasibility, define requirements, and assess programmatic resources necessary to implement this type of program. 7The full paper, "Development of an Orbital Sounding Rocket Program," is available at http://www.galex.caltech.edu/ASRAT/index.php/ Main_Page.
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From page 47... ...
NASA'S SOUNDING ROCKET CAPABILITIES Sounding Rocket Element of Recommendation 4: NASA should investigate the availability of these more capable surplus DOD motors and launch opportunities and provide an assessment of their applicability to the NASA suborbital program.
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