KAFB shutters satellite after yearslong research project
The largest unmanned satellite ever shot into orbit was shut down earlier this summer and left to float hundreds of miles above Earth, bringing an end to a nearly 20-year, $170 million project to study radiation in space from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.
The entire effort was undertaken by the Air Force Research Lab’s Space Vehicles Directorate at KAFB, where the team of scientists who worked to collect the data celebrated the mission as a success.
Rachel Delaney, deputy program manager for AFRL’s Demonstration and Science Experiments, or DSX, satellite project, said the project started back in 2003 and the satellite reached a critical design milestone in 2008. The entire project lasted about 18 years and cost about $172 million, she said.
“It’s one of our longstanding experiments,” Delaney said. “And it’s exciting to be part of seeing it conclude and seeing what sort of data is going to come from it.”
The satellite was launched into medium Earth orbit in the summer of 2019 by the Space X Falcon Heavy Launch vehicle, which ferried the 80-by-16-meter satellite to an orbit of about 3,750 to 7,500 miles above Earth, said Robert Johnson, principal investigator on the project.
The satellite, which was designed and built at KAFB, was used in experiments in space for 706 days.
At that altitude, the satellite was able to perform experiments using very low frequency radio waves, or VLFs, on the Van Allen radiation belt.
“The purpose of the mission was to validate what the physicist told us would happen in space with low-frequency radio waves. What they had hypothesized was that VLFs would cause radiation to degrade much faster than it would naturally,” said Air Force Col. Eric Felt, commander of the Space Vehicles Directorate. “We had to put an experiment up in space. That’s where the idea of DSX came from.”
The Department of Defense was interested in being able to use low frequency radio waves to mitigate the effects of a nuclear bomb being detonated in space, which could destroy satellites and other space vehicles, Felt said.
“It is a real threat because North Korea has threatened to do that exact thing,” Felt said.
The goal would be to create a technology that would deter such an action from taking place.
“Our real hope with the technology is deterrence,” Felt said. “If a country knows they aren’t going to get a big advantage from doing a super horrible thing that the world is going to hate them for, then maybe they won’t do it in the first place.”