News | 2003 News Archive

AASC Builds To Spec Antenna for Mars

11/01/2003

AASC completed the major milestone of fabricating all parts, including the reflector shell structures, for the MRO HGA. AASC is under contract to design and build the High Gain Antenna assembly which will be assembled, tested and delivered in early 2004.

AASC has successfully completed the critical tasks of fabricating parts for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) High Gain Antenna (HGA.) The HGA is a 3-meter precision reflector, subreflector and feed support structure which was designed by AASC and will be fabricated, tested and delivered in February 2004. The design team successfully passed the CDR milestone in May of this year.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, will make a more comprehensive inspection of our planetary neighbor than any previous mission. As Earth pulls away from Mars after last month's close approach, NASA is developing MRO to take advantage of the next close encounter in 2005. MRO will examine landscape details as small as a coffee table with the most powerful telescopic camera ever sent to orbit a foreign planet. Some of its other tools will scan underground layers for water and ice, identify small patches of surface minerals to determine their composition and origins, track changes in atmospheric water and dust, and check global weather every day.

Workers at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, have already assembled the spacecraft structure and will later add the AASC-built high gain antenna and also instruments being built for it at the University of Arizona, Tucson; at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.; at the Italian Space Agency, Rome; at Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, Calif.; and at JPL.