Wednesday, March 3, 2010

AMF-6 Main Engine Burn Raises Perigee Altitude to 20 Mm

Apogee Motor Firing #6 was successfully completed Tuesday evening. The burn used about 6 minutes of ACS thruster firing and 13 minutes of Main Engine firing. This maneuver raised the SDO perigee altitude to about 20,100 km, or a period of 17.4 hr. The GNC team reported that the Main Engine burn was extremely quiet and the momentum disturbance due to the fuel sloshing was minimal. Due to the equipment outage at the Santiago ground station, most of ranging this evening was performed by SDOGS.