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 Agenc ...

(BMDO) satellite experiment (

unmanned space mission Uncrewed spacecraft or robotic spacecraft are spacecraft without people on board. Uncrewed spacecraft may have varying levels of autonomy from human input, such as remote control, or remote guidance. They may also be autonomous, in which they ...

) to map bright

infrared Infrared (IR; sometimes called infrared light) is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than that of visible light but shorter than microwaves. The infrared spectral band begins with the waves that are just longer than those ...

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

US Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Air force, air service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is one of the six United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Tracing its ori ...

launched the MSX satellite on a Delta II launch vehicle 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 the ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. MSX was placed in a

Sun-synchronous orbit A Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), also called a heliosynchronous orbit, is a nearly polar orbit around a planet, in which the satellite passes over any given point of the planet's surface at the same local mean solar time. More technically, it is ...

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 The United States Space Surveillance Network (SSN) detects, tracks, catalogs and identifies artificial objects orbiting Earth, e.g. active/inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, or fragmentation debris. The system is the responsibility of Uni ...

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 re-entered 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 (geometry), 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 ''galac ...

and areas either missed or identified as particularly bright by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) at wavelengths of 4.29

μm The micrometre (Commonwealth English as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; SI symbol: μm) or micrometer (American English), also commonly known by the non-SI term micron, is a unit of length in the International System ...

, 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 known ...

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 rocket ...

(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 and development detachment of the United States Air Force Air Force Materiel Command, Materiel Command dedicated to leading the discovery, development, and integration of direct- ...

and IPAC has resulted in an archive containing images for about 15 percent of the sky, including the entire

Galactic Plane The galactic plane is the plane (geometry), 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 ''galac ...

, the

Large Magellanic Cloud The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a dwarf galaxy and satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At a distance of around , the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy, Sagittarius Dwarf ...

, 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