Teledyne to Host Payloads on the International Space Station
Teledyne Technologies Incorporated today announced that Teledyne Brown Engineering’s Multi-User System for Earth Sensing (MUSES) was launched to the International Space Station (ISS) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on June 3, 2017. Over the last week, MUSES was installed on the ISS and completed a successful initial operational assessment.
MUSES was developed as part of a cooperative agreement with NASA and will provide opportunities for imaging, technology demonstration, and space qualification payloads supporting research, scientific studies and humanitarian efforts for both government and commercial customers. MUSES provides a precision-pointing environment for earth-viewing instruments, such as high-resolution digital cameras and hyperspectral imagers. It can accommodate up to four payloads simultaneously and offers the ability to robotically change, upgrade, and service those instruments.
Orbiting approximately 250 miles above the Earth, the MUSES platform will offer researchers a unique vantage point for Earth observation, disaster response, maritime domain awareness, agricultural applications, air and water quality, oil and gas exploration, mining, atmospheric investigations and fire detection.
“The MUSES platform installation is a tremendous step toward the commercialization of the International Space Station. The ability to return payloads and reuse canisters creates a low-cost path to space for professional-grade payloads,” said Robert Mehrabian, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer. “We are proud to be a part of this mission and look forward to many more in the future.”
The MUSES platform is ideal for both long-term operational instruments, and short-duration technology demonstrations including space hardware qualification. The unique ability to return payloads to earth allows for post-mission analysis and preservation of investment through reuse of instruments and payload canisters.
An on-board server located inside the ISS has the ability to buffer, store and transmit data from MUSES’ four payloads back to Earth at Teledyne’s Payload Operation Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The server has the bandwidth to support four MUSES payloads as well as the interconnectivity and data resources to support other experiments aboard the ISS.
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