Spartan 1


photo of Spartan 1 in the shuttle bay


* Mission Overview

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.

* Instrumentation

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.

* Science

During its 2 days of flight, Spartan-1 observed the Perseus cluster of galaxies and our galactic center region.


[Gallery] [Publications]

[All Missions] [by Time] [by Energy]

Page authors: Lorella Angelini Jesse Allen
HEASARC Home | Observatories | Archive | Calibration | Software | Tools | Students/Teachers/Public

Last modified: Thursday, 24-Sep-2020 17:37:05 EDT