Volume 5, Number 2 March/April 1997
Moving Forward
TEAM OF U.S. AND RUSSIAN
industry and government researchers led by NASA developed, manufactured, tested and
delivered the Mir Cooperative Solar Array (MCSA) in record time and under budget.
This goal was accomplished despite geographical obstacles and cultural and language
differences that made a project of this size and complexity that much more complex.
MCSA augments Mir's power system. The power from this flight solar array extends Mir's life and supports U.S. experiments on the station as part of the Phase I International Space Station program. MCSA was launched on the Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-74) in November 1995, and it was deployed and became operational in May 1996, less than one and a half years after the project's inception in January 1994. It is generating six kilowatts of electricity on Mir.
| This dramatic image was taken from Atlantis after undocking from Mir near the end of the STS-79 mission. The MCSA is seen vertically in the center of the image. Below: STS-71—A Mir cosmonaut and a Shuttle astronaut exchange a historic handshake in space. |
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Researchers developed MCSA by replacing an existing degraded array with a new U.S.-Russian jointly developed array that combined Russian flight-proven structures designed by the Rocket Space Corporation—Energia and mechanisms with U.S. higher performance photovoltaic panel modules (PPMs) produced by Lockheed-Martin. The MCSA Integrated Product Team was led by NASA's Lewis Research Center for the Space Station Program Office. Team members were from Rocketdyne, Lockheed-Martin and Rocket Space Corporation—Energia.
The team's greatest challenge was meeting project milestones. U.S. and Russian hardware delivery schedules were extremely tight. U.S. flight hardware had to be delivered to Russia in less than one year, and the Russians were required to assemble, test and ship MCSA to Kennedy Space Center six months after receiving U.S. flight PPMs.
The team operated independently to the extent possible under the Phase I International Space Station program. It generated and managed its own interface documentation and shipment of hardware to Russia and jointly developed a success-oriented plan to meet the demanding schedule.
U.S. flight hardware manufacturing began before the completion of the development tests in Moscow. The array qualification tests had to be conducted in parallel with the flight hardware acceptance tests.
Problems did arise, but they were handled by the team expeditiously and at minimal cost or schedule impact. For example, the team identified the necessity for PPM mass-stiffness simulators four months prior to their need date. The team located discarded solar cells from other projects, and the U.S. team manufactured and delivered nonfunctional, flight-like PPMs under cost and on schedule.
For more information, contact Mike Skor at Lewis Research Center.
Call 216/433-2286,
E-mail: m.skor@lerc.nasa.gov
Please mention you read about it in Innovation.
