Spartan 1
NASA's Spartan program was based on the idea of a simple, low-cost platform deployed from a space shuttle in orbit for a 2-3 day flight, then recovered and returned to Earth. The platform allows the experiments to get out of the messy shuttle environment and frees it of any shuttle pointing constraints.
Spartan-1 was deployed from the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-51G) on 20 June 1985 and retrieved 45.5 hours later.
The X-ray detectors aboard the Spartan platform were sensitive to the energy range 1-12 keV. The instrument scanned its target with narrowly collimated (5 arcmin x 3 degrees) gas scintillation proportional counters. There were 2 identical sets of counters, each having ~ 660 sq-cm effective area. Counts were accumulated for 0.812 s into 128 energy channels. The energy resolution was 16% at 6 keV.
During its 2 days of flight, Spartan-1 observed the Perseus cluster of galaxies and our galactic center region.
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Mission Overview