The IMAGE Monthly Camera

August 1996 - Number 3

Editor: J. L. Burch

SwRI, P.O. Drawer 28510
San Antonio, TX 78228-0510
tel: (210) 522-2526
e-mail: jburch@swri.edu

Contents

- Recent Activities
- Upcoming Events
- Team Activities

Recent Activities

As announced earlier by e-mail, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space (LMMS) has been selected to develop the IMAGE spacecraft bus. LMMS won out over four other companies, all of which submitted excellent proposals. However, the LMMS proposal was rated significantly ahead of the others, particularly in understanding of the mission requirements, application of new technology, and reasonableness of cost. The IMAGE team at LMMS will be derived from their Lunar Prospector Team. The IMAGE Mission Requirements Review, which will be held at LMMS in Sunnyvale, CA on September 10-12, 1996, will be a good opportunity to learn more about the features of the spacecraft design. We plan to make the technical volume of the spacecraft proposal available to the IMAGE team pending approval of LMMS.

Upcoming Events

The IMAGE Concept Review will be held on December 3 - 5, 1996 at Southwest Research Institute.

Tom Moore is a co-convenor of a magnetospheric imaging special session at the Fall AGU meeting. IMAGE will be represented by five invited papers (Burch, Smith, Young, Reiff, and Gallagher). Contributed papers are also solicited, and this session will be a good place to show people what we are doing on IMAGE.

Team Activities

[IMAGE Logo] A draft logo for IMAGE has been e-mailed and put on the IMAGE FTP site at SwRI (pluto.space.swri.edu). A copy of the logo is shown here. Several comments have already been received, and a new version is under construction. Some of the comments that are being addressed are: 1. NASA needs to be acknowledged; 2. the U.S. flag needs to be more prominent than the others; 3. the RPI picture needs to be improved. In the new version a small sun is shown against a star background. When a new version is ready on the FTP site it will be announced by e-mail.

Jim Green, Mark Smith, and Rob Kilgore of GSFC have produced an IMAGE poster, which they will be sending out in the near future.

Two additions to the RPI team are Jean-Louis Bougeret and Bob Manning of the Observatoire de Paris in Meudon. Their interest is in using thermal noise analysis to determine local plasma density. In addition, there is a possibility for Meudon to provide amplifier hardware for RPI.

The FUV Spectrographic Imager design has been modified by moving the spectrometer grating to the entrance in a Wadsworth spectrometer arrangement, which allows the instrument to have fewer bounce paths because of the lower intensities it has to deal with after the grating.

[Payload Layout] Shown at left is the current IMAGE payload layout. When the harness is added, space will be tight, and the baseplate diameter is fixed. Therefore, it is imperative that the various instrument footprints not grow beyond this point.

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