Ten years ago yesterday — sorry, I haven’t been feeling well — on September 30, 2001, an Athena-1 launch vehicle lifted off from the Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska.
(Starshine-3 undergoing inspection at the US Naval Research Laboratory. NASA image.)
The rocket carried the Starshine-3 microsatellite (pictured above) along with three other small satellites.
Starshine-3 was an updated version of the “Student Tracked Atmospheric Research Satellite Heuristic International Networking Experiment,” which I first covered in this space history blog entry.
The other payloads on this launch were:
- Picosat-9, a British-built US DoD space test satellite
- PCSat, the “Prototype Communications SATellite,” an amateur radio relay spacecraft built by US Naval Academy midshipmen
- Sapphire, the “Stanford Audiophonic Photographic Infrared Experiment,” a US DoD microsatellite built by Stanford University students and faculty
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