The Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX)

The MSX is designed and built around an infrastructure of eight scientific teams; it will be the first and only extended duration, multiwavelength (0.1 to 28 μm) phenomenology measurement program funded and managed by BMDO. During its 16 month cryogen lifetime and five year satellite lifetime, MSX will provide high quality target, Earth, Earthlimb, and celestial multiwavelength phenomenology data. This data is essential to fill critical gaps in phenomenology and discrimination data bases, furthering development of robust models of representative scenes, and assessing optical discrimination algorithms. The MSX organization is comprised of self-directed work teams in six functional areas. Experiments formulated by each of the eight scientific teams will be executed on the satellite in a 903 km near polar orbit (99.23° inclination), with an eccentricity of 0.001, argument of perigee of 0, and the right ascension of the ascending node is 250.0025. Two dedicated target missions are planned consisting of one Strategic Target System launch and two Low Cost Launch Vehicles launches. These target missions will deploy various targets, enabling the MSX principal investigator teams to study key issues such as metric discrimination, deployment phase tracking, cluster tracking, fragment bulk filtering, tumbling re-entry vehicle signatures, etc. A data management infrastructure to ensure that the data is processed, analyzed, and archived will be available at launch time. The raw data and its associated calibration files and software will be archived, providing the customer with a cataloged database. This paper describes the MSX program objectives, target missions, data management architecture, and organization