Pegsat

The Pegsat spacecraft was the first to be launched using the privately-developed winged Pegasus rocket booster released from an aircraft in flight. The project involved DARPA, DoD, and NASA. The three-function payload included instrumentation to help establish the launch vehicle payload environment by measurement of variations in launch vehicle and spacecraft attitude, temperature, pressure, structural loading and vibrations. It also ejected a small Navy experimental communications relay satellite (SECS). The third function was a NASA pair of barium chemical release experiments. The experiments were part of a NASA plan to recover some of the science objectives lost when the CRRES spacecraft was reconfigured from a Shuttle launch to an Atlas-1 launch. The interactions of the released chemicals with the magnetic and electric fields in the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere were to be observed from a network of ground sites in central Canada and the United States. Both releases, on April 16 and April 25, 1990, were successfully observed by the western stations.

Last update: 27.09.2009
Contact: gunter.krebs@skyrocket.de
© Gunter Dirk Krebs