Astronomy With the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) Satellite

The Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) is a Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) mission to support research on space-based tracking of ballistic missiles. It will also perform a wide variety of research involving global change, astronomy, and space debris. The Applied Physics Labboratory/JHU is under contract to build, launch, and operate the MSX satellite during its five-year lifetime. Launch is scheduled for November 1994 aboard a Delta II booster from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Mission altitude is approximately 900 km, in a high-inclination, circular, near sun-synchronous Earth orbit. MSX will collect several terabytes of data on Earth, Earthlimb, and Celestial backgrounds. The spacecraft carries a suite of state-of-the-art sensors, including a cryogenic infrared scanning radiometer and Fourier-transform spectrometer (built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory/USU), plus four visible and ultraviolet imagers and five visible and ultraviolet spectrographic imagers (built by the Applied Physics Labboratory/JHU). The eleven optical sensors cover the spectrum from the far ultraviolet through the longwave infrared (0.11 to 28 micrometers) and are precisely aligned so targets can be viewed simultaneously with multiple sensors. Initial observations of M31 and Eta Carina will be shown.