Tim Furniss/LONDON
NASA PLANS TO launch three interplanetary space missions before 2000, as part of a $100 million-a-year New Millennium space-technology validation effort.
The first to be launched in 1998, will be built by Spectrum Astro at a cost of about $30 million. It is the first major civil space contract won by Spectrum and its spacecraft will fly-by an asteroid and a comet. The targets for the one-year to 18-month-long New Millennium 1 mission will be announced later.
The craft, weighing 100kg, will be used to demonstrate a variety of advanced technologies planned to allow NASA to fly ambitious deep space and Earth-orbiting missions in the 21st century.
It will be the first to derive thrust from ion-drive, extending its already-proven uses for attitude control and small orbit changes to larger applications. The craft will travel at a speed of 10km/s.
Developed from NASA and US Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation technologies, the system will use a 260mm-diameter thruster, which expels high-velocity beams of xenon gas ionised using the electricity produced by solar arrays.
Technologies likely to be demonstrated on the first flight include new lightweight structures, a miniaturised deep-space communications antenna, advanced solar arrays and lithium-polymer spacecraft batteries.
The New Millennium 1 will carry a miniaturised imaging spectrometer to produce chemical maps of the asteroid and comet and will be given unprecedented independent decision-making and navigation computer technologies. The New Millennium missions will be managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. No details have yet been released on missions 2 and 3.
Source: Flight International
