Sunday, January 27, 2013

Orbital Science’s SORCE Satellite celebrates ten years in space

Orbital Sciences, a premier American company specializing in the manufacturing and launch of satellites, celebrated the tenth anniversary of Solar and Radiation Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite’s successful operation.

In 2003, SORCE satellite was sent into orbit aboard the Pegasus rocket of Orbital, in a mission that originated from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The initial plan for the satellite’s mission was to supply continuous solar climate science and Earth atmospheric data for a span of five years. Ten years after that, the program’s Mission Operations Center at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) is still receiving data that is shared with the science community all over the world.

“The SORCE mission is an ideal example of how academia, government and industry can partner to advance science investigations and our understanding of the world around us. The Principal Investigator model for developing and operating high-value science missions has proven to be very successful on programs like SORCE and NASA-funded Explorer-class missions,” Orbital Sciences Vice President of Business Development Rob Fulton said in a statement. “The SORCE program is an excellent example of this model, with the spacecraft and overall mission doubling the duration originally planned for the program.”

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