UVPI Imaging from the LACE Satellite: The Starbird Rocket Plume
Abstract
The Starbird rocket provides the second demonstration of the ability of the Ultraviolet Plume Instrument (UVPI) to observe missiles in flight above the atmosphere. The Starbird was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 18 December 1990. The UVPI is a small, plume-tracking instrument flown on the Naval Research Laboratory's Low-power Atmospheric Compensation Experiment (LACE) satellite, launched in February 1990. The two cameras of the instrument, a tracker and a plume camera, use filters, image intensifiers, and CCD detectors to observe sources in the ultraviolet. The plume camera has a narrow field of view, 0.180 deg by 0.135 deg, and observes sources through any of the four filters with passbands of 195 to 295 nm, 200 to 300 nm, 235 to 350 nm, and 300 to 320 nm. The Starbird third and fourth stages, both of which used identical Orbus rocket motors, reached 90-km altitude and were successfully detected and tracked by the UVPI from a range of 596 to 483 km. The spectral radiance and intensities of the missile plumes were extracted from these images and made into contour plots. Spatial,
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 18, 1993
- Accession Number
- ADA271981
Entities
People
- D. M. Horan
- E. R. Malaret
- H. W. Smathers
- J. G. Cardon
- L. Perez
Organizations
- United States Naval Research Laboratory