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Unboxing

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a new

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NASA spacecraft

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Hey everyone, we’re here with Steve Turek from Orbital ATK.

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Something is about to happen that we haven’t shown here at NASA yet.

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What you’re seeing behind us is the unboxing of the ICON spacecraft.

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We’ve shipped it from Gilbert, Arizona and we brought it here

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to the launch processing facility here at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

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Now, ICON is the Ionospheric Connection Explorer.

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That’s correct.

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And that’s going to be studying the upper atmosphere.

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It’s going to give us an understanding of our weather in our atmosphere and spatial weather.

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We don’t quite have a handle on what’s going on up there in the ionosphere.

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So this will give us an opportunity to understand that.

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Now this is not a very big spacecraft in terms of what we normally think of satellites.

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That’s correct because it’s going inside a Pegasus rocket.

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And what is that Pegasus XL?

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It is an Orbital ATK rocket that gets integrated to the bottom of its L-1011.

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It’ll go to a launch box. It’ll be dropped and then the motors will ignite and it will put it in its orbit.

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Now I understand what they’re going to do is that they’ve just taken off the top portion of the box.

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And why did they take it off in sections as a opposed to just taking all off at once?

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As you can see there’s a sub-structure underneath the shipping container lid.

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Now that sub-structure is a melinex-type cover with an aluminum sub-structure

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that inside there its being purged to keep ICON very clean.

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We want to be able to have eyes on that sub-structure

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so we don’t bind up when we’re lifting the lower pieces of the lid.

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Alright, Steve. I think we’re getting ready to lift the second half here.

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We are. It looks like they have succeeded.

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They’re just going around. They’re looking at the perimeter

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to make sure there’s no hang ups and they’ll just continue forward lifting it up.

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And of course, they’re lifting it very slowly to make sure they’re not going to hit the spacecraft.

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That’s correct. And it looks very good at this point.

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The crane has three speeds - really fast, fast, and a micro-slow speed.

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And right now it’s on a micro-slow speed.

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And this will take a few minutes before they can get to the point where they can remove it.

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So just, for the first time you are seeing an unboxing of an actual NASA satellite. How cool is that.

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You can see the silver covers at the bottom, those are the solar ray panels.

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The solar rays provide power for the observatory.

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At the bottom of the shipping container, you can see a little black box.

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Okay.

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That black box is a shock recorder, so during transit we can monitor,

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we will be able to download the data from that little box

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and it will tell us how much shock the observatory saw during its shipment.

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That's a good point, so you drove this on a truck

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to California to take it to Vandenberg, but if it hits a pothole,

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if it hits, you know, something that, that really

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Yeah, there's speed bumps at the truck weighing stations that we try to avoid,

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so there's limited -- I mean it's a soft ride environmentally controlled truck.

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We don't think there are any issues during the shipment,

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but we do have it instrumented to provide that objective evidence that nothing was done during the shipment.

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This is probably a dumb question, but, you know, a lot of these unboxings, the person gets to play with it.

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You know, you open up the box and I get to play with the phone. Can we go play with the spacecraft?

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No, no you can't play with the spacecraft. However, the spacecraft will play with us.

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So once we get it inside the clean room, we will instrument it with EGSE, and we'll do a post-shipment test.

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What's EGSE?

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Electrical ground support equipment. Okay.

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So Steve, this is another part where we're bringing another piece of apparatus to attach to the spacecraft.

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Yeah, this is the actual fixture that's going to lift ICON off of its shipping container base.

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It's called a vertical lift sling. Okay.

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It's a very critical lift. At this point, this is where you're actually lifting the observatory,

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the flight hardware, the $40 million-plus piece, off the ground

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onto this high stand for all the close-out and testing activities inside the tank A-10. 

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Now the cool thing about this is, we don't get to show this on a normal basis.

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This is a first. I mean, to actually see a critical lift of a spacecraft

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being lifted off from the platform onto its -- what's this called again?

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This is the integration high stand.

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Yeah so, this is going to be an awesome sight to see. This is the first time, so I'm excited.

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Now, one of the things that I noticed for the folks who are in the bunny suits,

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they have a device that's attached from their suit to a hard point. What is that for? 

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That's an ESD ground strap. Okay.

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So it not only protects the hardware from an ESD event -- electrostatic discharge event --

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it also protects the operator,

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so if there was any surge of power coming back to the operator it would be filtered or absorbed by that.

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And it would be a bad day if they weren't wearing those, and they did have a static discharge on the spacecraft?

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If it had the potential to do life-threatening damage to them, yes.

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Well, Steve, thank you so much for joining us. You've seen the first unveiling of a NASA satellite, ICON -- the Ionospheric Connection Explorer. 

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