Kirtland Satellite Operations Team awarded

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  • Space & Missile Systems Center Public Affairs
Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. --  Retired Lt. Gen. Gene Tattini, former commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center and currently the deputy director at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., visited the Space Development and Test Directorate recently to congratulate the SDTD CloudSat Operations team for a groundbreaking recovery from a six-month-long anomalous condition.

CloudSat is a one-of-a-kind weather radar satellite launched in 2006 as one of a five-satellite earth-observing weather science constellation called the "A-Train."

Selected as part of NASA's Pathfinder program, CloudSat flies a radar more than 1,000 times more sensitive than existing weather radars, providing detection of smaller ice and water particles within clouds than ever before, enhancing understanding of weather patterns.

In April 2011, the satellite experienced a crippling battery anomaly that shut down its payload and forced the satellite to drop out of the A-Train for safety reasons.

Since launch, the satellite has been operated out of the Research, Development, Test and Evaluation Support Complex at Kirtland Air Force Base, the Air Force's only R&D satellite operations center. The operations team consisting of Air Force Space Command officers and LinQuest contractors kept the satellite in seamless operations for two years past its expected lifespan. Therefore when the undervoltage condition onboard persisted, many believed that CloudSat had seen its last days.

However, due to the irreplaceable nature and uniqueness of the payload radar, the relevance of the satellite's data to cutting edge weather modeling around the world, including to the Air Force Weather Service, as well as its complementary nature to the data from the other A-Train satellites run by allied mission partners, such as the French Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales and the Canadian Space Agency, members scrambled to beat the odds. A joint team was formed among the Air Force, satellite manufacturer LinQuest, Ball Aerospace and NASA JPL to investigate and attempt to restore CloudSat.

Four hundred plus operation memograms, 150 anomaly resolution meetings, 30 training sessions and six months later, the team had designed, tested and responsively adapted a groundbreaking new concept of operations they called DO-OP: Daylight Only Operations.

Re-working risk management strategies and exploiting the momentum caused by Earth's magnetic field, the team cycled the payload and satellite sub-systems between being in the sunlight and being in the shadow of the Earth.

Through critical commanding over several nights and weeks, the team engineered positive thermal and power profiles in tune with the satellite's entry and exit from sunshine above the Earth. By October 2011,
CloudSat's unique cloud-imaging radar was functioning during 96 percent of the sunlit orbit. The team had brought the "left-for-dead" satellite back to life.

Gen. Tattini presented the operations team with a NASA certificate of appreciation, as well as individual congratulatory certificates, and expressed his gratitude to the SD team for its dedication and pursuit of excellence in refusing to give up on CloudSat.

"Cowboy operators are frowned upon," the certificate reads, "but operators who cowboy up are greatly appreciated."