RELEASE NO: 99-91
ÿ
ORBITAL SCIENCES CORPORATION SELECTED TO PROVIDE QUIKTOMS
NASA has selected Orbital Sciences Corporation (Orbital) to build, launch and operate the Quik Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (QuikTOMS). Under terms of the $15 million fixed price delivery order, Orbital will provide the spacecraft, integrate the previously built TOMS-5 instrument (also supplied by Orbital), and provide three years of mission operations.QuikTOMS was previously scheduled to be launched onboard a Russian Meteor-3M spacecraft. However, due to a Russian delay which puts the mission out of the critical science window for TOMS, NASA and Russia agreed to halt cooperation on the mission. Therefore, NASA had to find another spacecraft and launch vehicle.
QuikTOMS is now scheduled to fly on-board Orbital four-stage, ground-launched Taurus rocket in August 2000 as a secondary payload. The primary payload is Orbital OrbView 4 satellite.
The delivery order was awarded by NASA?s Goddard Space Flight Center?s (Greenbelt, Md.) Rapid Spacecraft Development Office (RSDO) and will be managed by the QuikTOMS Project Office at Goddard. QuikTOMS is the fourth satellite procured thorough the RSDO, and is the result of a NASA initiative to assemble "faster, better, cheaper" missions by utilizing commercial spacecraft platforms or buses. The QuikTOMS effort entails the construction of a spacecraft in less than 13 months.
NASA scientists will use the QuikTOMS instrument to continuously monitor changes in the global ozone as well as, sulfur dioxide and ash from large volcanic eruptions, smoke from forest fires and from forest clearing in the tropical rain forests, and the flux of ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth?s surface.
The TOMS spacecraft will be operated from a Orbital ground station at their headquarters in Dulles, Va., and will provide full telemetry, tracking, and command capabilities.
QuikTOMS will carry TOMS-5, the fifth TOMS sensor built for NASA. Flown on U.S., Russian and Japanese satellites, these instruments have enabled the international science community to better understand the ozone layer and the factors that alter atmospheric zone distribution.
The first TOMS instrument was launched in 1978 aboard the Nimbus-7 spacecraft and continued to provide data for more than 14 years. The second TOMS was flown on the Soviet Meteor-3 spacecraft, a U.S.-USSR cooperative mission launched in 1991, which operated successfully for more than three years. TOMS-3 was launched aboard the EP-TOMS spacecraft in July 1996 and is still providing excellent data. TOMS-4 was launched on the Japanese ADEOS spacecraft in August 1996 and operated for 10 months until failure of the spacecraft power system ended the mission.
The QuikTOMS satellite is part of NASA 's Earth Science Enterprise, a coordinated research effort to study the Earth as a global environmental system. TOMS?s data are processed at Goddard and in most cases, ozone values are mapped and made available within hours, and full global maps are usually available within 24 hours. These data, including color images of the global ozone, are available over the Internet on the TOMS home page at: http://jwocky.gsfc.nasa.gov/