Via Spaceflightnow.com
For the past four decades a band of orbiting sentinels has watched the world and sounded the alarm when enemy missiles take flight. Now, a new generation of advanced satellites that began launching Saturday will continue standing guard while also giving the U.S. military better insights into global hotspots.
The Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous-1 missile warning satellite, mounted atop an Atlas 5 rocket, thundered away from Cape Canaveral's Complex 41 launch pad at 2:10 p.m. EDT after years of daunting and expensive development.
The towering launcher soared into the Florida sky and set sail toward a highly elliptical geosynchronous transfer orbit where the 10,000-pound payload was successfully deployed 43 minutes later.
Controllers will spend the next nine days conducting six critical maneuvers to boost the SBIRS GEO-1 satellite into a circular geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the planet where it can match Earth's rotation over the equator.
Valued at more than $1.2 billion, this satellite begins the next era for warning spacecraft that continuously monitor the globe to alert the national leadership and battlefield commanders of missile launches. It evolves the orbiting system from the Cold War focus on intercontinental ballistic missiles to today's short-range missile threats by incorporating new technologies to make quicker detections of fainter objects.
"There's a global imperative for performing strategic missile warning now and well into the future. We will always have the gold standard for missile warning," said Brig. Gen. (s) Roger Teague, director of the U.S. Air Force's Infrared Space Systems Directorate.
"From a sensitivity perspective, SBIRS sees dimmer targets, dimmer events of interest much sooner," Teague says. "With that information it allows us to take and decimate events of interest much, much faster and tightens our OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act). It allows us to make appropriate decisions and take appropriate actions much, much faster."
SBIRS GEO-1 was built by Lockheed Martin using the company's commercial A2100 satellite design with a 12-year mission life. It features a pair of power-generating solar arrays, two communications antenna wings that unfold and a deployable light shade to shield its sensitive infrared instruments.
And unlike the previous generation of Defense Support Program missile warning satellites that have only scanning sensors, the SBIRS GEO spacecraft are equipped with both scanning and staring instruments to increase the amount of reconnaissance that can be collected.
"SBIRS has the two payloads vice the one and it's got two telescopes -- one that's able to do like a windshield wiper-type scan, that's the scanner, and the starer is able to focus and sit there and look at any given area continuously as opposed to spinning around or scanning back and forth," said Jeff Smith, Lockheed Martin's vice president and SBIRS program director.
The scanning instrument on SBIRS satellites will provide the global observations like DSP spacecraft have produced for decades. But the addition of the staring sensor enables the military to examine a very specific region for emerging threats and fast-moving targets.
"The ability to task this system to do both global and theater missions and intelligence missions simultaneously is really the revolutionary part of this system," said Smith.
For the past four decades a band of orbiting sentinels has watched the world and sounded the alarm when enemy missiles take flight. Now, a new generation of advanced satellites that began launching Saturday will continue standing guard while also giving the U.S. military better insights into global hotspots. The Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous-1 missile warning satellite, mounted atop an Atlas 5 rocket, thundered away from Cape Canaveral's Complex 41 launch pad at 2:10 p.m. EDT after years of daunting and expensive development.
The towering launcher soared into the Florida sky and set sail toward a highly elliptical geosynchronous transfer orbit where the 10,000-pound payload was successfully deployed 43 minutes later.
Controllers will spend the next nine days conducting six critical maneuvers to boost the SBIRS GEO-1 satellite into a circular geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the planet where it can match Earth's rotation over the equator.
Valued at more than $1.2 billion, this satellite begins the next era for warning spacecraft that continuously monitor the globe to alert the national leadership and battlefield commanders of missile launches. It evolves the orbiting system from the Cold War focus on intercontinental ballistic missiles to today's short-range missile threats by incorporating new technologies to make quicker detections of fainter objects.
"There's a global imperative for performing strategic missile warning now and well into the future. We will always have the gold standard for missile warning," said Brig. Gen. (s) Roger Teague, director of the U.S. Air Force's Infrared Space Systems Directorate.
"From a sensitivity perspective, SBIRS sees dimmer targets, dimmer events of interest much sooner," Teague says. "With that information it allows us to take and decimate events of interest much, much faster and tightens our OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act). It allows us to make appropriate decisions and take appropriate actions much, much faster."
SBIRS GEO-1 was built by Lockheed Martin using the company's commercial A2100 satellite design with a 12-year mission life. It features a pair of power-generating solar arrays, two communications antenna wings that unfold and a deployable light shade to shield its sensitive infrared instruments.
And unlike the previous generation of Defense Support Program missile warning satellites that have only scanning sensors, the SBIRS GEO spacecraft are equipped with both scanning and staring instruments to increase the amount of reconnaissance that can be collected.
"SBIRS has the two payloads vice the one and it's got two telescopes -- one that's able to do like a windshield wiper-type scan, that's the scanner, and the starer is able to focus and sit there and look at any given area continuously as opposed to spinning around or scanning back and forth," said Jeff Smith, Lockheed Martin's vice president and SBIRS program director.
The scanning instrument on SBIRS satellites will provide the global observations like DSP spacecraft have produced for decades. But the addition of the staring sensor enables the military to examine a very specific region for emerging threats and fast-moving targets.
"The ability to task this system to do both global and theater missions and intelligence missions simultaneously is really the revolutionary part of this system," said Smith.
I saw this launch the other day. I think it's pretty funny that with these military launches all of the information is extremely hush hush around the cape. Yet anyone with a smartphone and internet connection can easily get the low down on it if they want. It looks to be a major advancement in surveillance and early warning systems."The real warfighting advantage," Teague says, "is the persistency of the SBIRS system, that I can persistently examine and surveille a given area of interest 24-by-7, where ever it might be needed in any part of the world, to be able to collect the valuable intelligence information so that our warfighting commanders -- both theater as well as strategic -- will be able to take the appropriate measures in response to any actionable information they might receive from the SBIRS systems. It really is a new era of warfighting and surveillance capability."
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