The Mars Express test bench at Astrium SAS, Toulouse, France. Photo: ESA

In its first year since its launch last summer, the Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.-built QuikSCAT satellite has helped set a U.S. record. QuikSCAT carries the first scatterometer launched by the U.S. that exceeds a one-year life span. It is also the first U.S. scatterometer to produce one full annual cycle of ocean surface winds, according to W. Timothy Liu, Ph.D., QuikSCAT project scientist of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which built the SeaWinds scatterometer aboard QuikSCAT.

QuikSCAT, completed in less than a year by Ball Aerospace for the Goddard Space Flight Center, is also a record-setting build for a spacecraft of its size.

Launched in June of 1999, QuikSCAT measures ocean surface winds. QuikSCAT acquired its first scientifically valid wind data July 19, 1999. There were two earlier U.S. scatterometers. SEASAT was launched in 1978, but lasted only about 90 days. The second, aboard ADEOS-1, worked about nine months following its 1996 launch.

According to Dr. Liu, European scatterometers measure at different frequencies and have less coverage than U.S. scatterometers. QuikSCAT's scatterometer records sea-surface wind speed and direction data for global climate research, collecting approximately 400,000 measurements daily. The satellite circles the Earth every 100 minutes at a distance of 800 km (500 miles). QuikSCAT is managed by JPL for NASAšs Earth Science Enterprise, and is part of a long-term, coordinated research effort to study the total Earth system and the effects of natural and human-induced changes in the environment.

"We are extremely pleased with the success of our QuikSCAT satellite and the scientific research, via SeaWinds, that our spacecraft enables," said David L. Taylor, vice president of Commercial Space Operations for Ball Aerospace. "QuikSCAT was built within a very constricted timeframe in order to minimize data loss caused by the failure of ADEOS-1. The performance of our Ball Commercial Platform 2000 (BCP 2000) satellite, used for QuikSCAT, and for the future launches of QuickBird 1 and 2, and ICESat, demonstrates our commitment to provide reliable commercial spacecraft for government and industry."

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. provides imaging and communications products for commercial and government customers worldwide and is a subsidiary of Ball Corporation, a Fortune 500 company which had sales of $3.6 billion in 1999.