One Year Design Life has Stretched to Eight Full Years
The NASA’s Earth Observer-1 (EO-1) has reached its eighth anniversary on orbit. The EO-1 satellite, launched on November 21, 2000 had an initial design and mission life of one year, but has continued successful operations for more than 7 years past the initial mission. ATK served as the Prime Contractor, Mission Integrator and Bus Developer for the EO-1 mission. The Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) mission developed and validated a number of instrument and spacecraft bus breakthrough technologies designed to enable the development of future earth imaging observatories.
“The on orbit performance of the EO-1 satellite is extraordinary and a testimony to the capabilities of ATK,” stated Carl Marchetto, President of ATK’s Space Systems. “I am proud of ATK’s talented and dedicated engineers and workforce who work toward excellence in mission and program execution.”
EO-1 has performed over 76,000 images to date and has spawned over 404 related publications. EO-1 is currently being used as part of a sensor web that allows autonomous observing of earth images. The EO-1 extended mission supports on-orbit testbed activities for advanced technology and hyper-spectral research. Currently EO-1 is performing more than 90 data collection events a week. The Spacecraft mission has performed non traditional earth observation activities such as the monitoring of brush fires, assessing post hurricane damage and monitoring active volcanic eruptions using both multi-spectral and hyper-spectral imaging.
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