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Aviation History
1983
1983 - 0052.PDF
When deployed, the Viking probe will be festooned with magnetospheric measuring devices •::.% led with next year It is now studying and testing com ponents for ducted rockets as power sources for missiles in the 1990s. Such units use an under-oxidised solid grain, producing a fuel-rich exhaust to which atmospheric air is added. This produces, in effect, an afterburning rocket which should be twice as fuel-efficient as a conventional rocket. Rocket components of today are much in evidence at Volvo, and include com bustion chambers, welded in titatinum/ cobalt alloy, for Ariane. Volvo makes both the Viking 5 chambers (four in every first stage) and the single big nozzle of the second-stage engine. A Volvo team has been touring the USA in recent months looking for sheet metal, fuel systems, and spacecraft work. Sweden studies RPVs Service entry in 1990 is the goal estab lished by the Swedish Defence Ministry for a remotely piloted vehicle capable of operating as far as 100km from base. Requests for proposals went out at the end of November 1982, and LM Ericsson is already working on a three-year study of both the ground-based and airborne ele ments of the guidance system, as well as reconnaissance payloads. Swedish Army requirement is for de tailed reconnaissance of enemy ground forces, rather than laser designation. Pay- loads will be sophisticated, but the air frame will be simple, probably propeller- driven, and may be bought off the shelf. Surveillance systems being studied include radars, millimetre wave radars, passive radar warning receivers, forward- looking infrared, IR linescan and TV. Terrain matching is being studied for navigation, but the most likely system to start with will be inertial, with position update from ground-based radar. The vehicle will fly search patterns fed into it immediately prior to launch, "pop ping up" periodically for INS update by radar and possibly transmitting TV pic tures. The datalink will also enable the INS to be reprogrammed in flight. Radar position update will be trans mitted in C-band by Ericsson Super Giraffes, with enhanced angular tracking accuracy derived from bigger antennas. The spread-spectrum datalink will be the same as that used on the Saab-Bofors RBS15G glide bomb—offering high jam resistance and low-fade TV signals at low grazing angles and extreme range. Most data reduction will be carried out after recovery. Ericsson has already flight-tested ele ments of a tercom system and has recorded outputs which have been used to "fly" a computer model. The company is also working on a lightweight linescanner. 68 Viking launch Sweden's first national satellite,Viking, is being integrated at Saab-Scania's Linkoping facility and is on schedule for launch in October 1984. Viking will contain five experiments which will look at the Earth's magnetosphere, with particular emphasis on the Aurora Borealis. Although Saab is prime contractor, the platform has been built by Boeing Aerospace. The experiments are being integrated on to their bus by Saab. They comprise: • Three boom-mounted electric field sensors (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) # Boom-mounted magnetometer (John Hopkins University, Maryland, USA) • Seven detectors to measure energy and angular distribution of charged particles (Kiruna Geophysical Institute) 0 Three boom-mounted loop antennas to measure electromagnetic-wave phenom ena (Uppsala Ionospheric Laboratory and Danish Space Research Institute) # Ultraviolet imager to photograph au rora (University of Calgary, Canada) Viking is expected to spend eight months sending data back from its polar orbit, which will have a perigee of 820km and an apogee of 15,000km. The satellite's round, thin layout is demanded by its "piggy-back" position on the Ariane launcher. Viking sits in between the rocket's third stage and France's Spot earth-resources satellite. Saab builds the on-board computers for both Ariane and i Spot. , As well as causing auroral effects, the behaviour of charged particles in the mag- * netosphere has been known for many i years to affect radio wave propagations and climate, but Viking will be the first satellite to investigate the behaviour com- * prehensively. The magnetosphere takes , up the band between roughly 4,000km and 15,000km from the Earth's surface. Low cost has been paramount in Viking's > development; Saab's contract is for SKr80 , million (£6-7 million). 0 Sweden launches between five and 20 sounding rockets a year from Esrange. » Typical payloads weigh 500kg, and they % resemble satellites in complexity, accord ing to the Swedish Space Corporation. One example of a payload is a micro- gravity experiment in which an ellipsoidal lamp focuses heat energy to raise the temperature of specimens to 1,000°C. ' Cooling then takes place at zero g. Fifteen , launches have been conducted with the SSC/Saab S19 sounding-rocket guidance system; six were Nasa-operated rockets * and three were Canadian, the rest being , Swedish. The S19 is claimed to reduce trajectory and impact dispersions by a ' factor of ten, and a peak altitude of 660km J has been reached. FLIGHT International, 8 January 1983 !
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