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Kosmos 3M Booster Carries Six Satellites to Earth Orbit
By Jim Banke
Senior Producer,
posted: 04:00 am ET
27 September 2003
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A half-dozen small satellites were sent into Earth orbit early Saturday riding a Russian rocket launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, according to international news reports. Spacecraft aboard the Kosmos-3M booster included "space firsts" for the nations of Nigeria and Turkey. In fact, Nigerian residents were reportedly able to watch the blast off live on national television. The 10-story, two-stage rocket derived from the SS-5 nuclear missile lifted off at 2:12 a.m. EDT (0612 GMT) and successfully delivered its cargo into a polar orbit, Russian space officials said. Launch had been delayed several months due to schedule conflicts, and then an attempt early Friday was called off due to last-minute technical problems that were resolved in time to keep the slip to only 24 hours. According to Russian space officials, the Kosmos-3M manifest included: - A Russian communications experiment called Rubin-4 DSI. Attached to the rocket's second stage, the device is to transmit telemetry to the ground via standard e-mail using the Orbcomm communications satellites.
- A Russian technology demonstration satellite called Mozhayets-4, which was built by students at the Mozhaisk Military Space Academy. It is designed to test hardware that could be used in the future on Russia's Glonass satellite navigation system.
A trio of spacecraft that are part of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC), which is a group of small Earth imaging satellites. BILSAT-1, NigeriaSat-1 and UK-DMC represent contributions from Turkey, Nigeria and Great Britain, respectively.For Turkey, BILSAT-1 marks the first time the nation has designed part of the satellite's experiment package on its own. The satellite itself -- along with the two other DMC birds, were designed and built by Britain's Surrey Satellite Technology, Ltd. For Nigeria, Nigeriasat-1 marks the nation's first-ever space effort to reach orbit. Nigeria's space program has been the source of some controversy within the developing nation's borders. A South Korean technology demonstration platform designed to test new satellite systems, while at the same time playing host to five science experiments provided by an international team of researchers.The platform is known by a pair of acronyms: STSAT-1 (Science and Technology Satellite-1) or KAISTSAT (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology Satellite). The five experiments are known as the far-ultraviolet imaging spectrograph (FIMS), solid state telescope (SST), data collection system (DCS), narrow angle star sensor (NAST) and spectroscopy of plasma evolution from astrophysical radiation (SPEAR). The Kosmos 3M launch was the first of what could have been a trio of space shots on Saturday. Orbital launches from Japan and French Guiana were expected later in the day, but the launch of Japan's H-2A rocket with a pair of spy satellites aboard was scrubbed due to a technical problem with the booster. Japanese news media report that the launch will be postponed until at least Oct. 2. More from SPACE.com:
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