IBEX Launch Puts Telemetry and Communications Group to the Test

The mandate of NASA's Launch Services Program is to be able to launch any vehicle, anytime, from anywhere in the world.

The program lives up to this goal year after year, mission after mission. But the upcoming launch of the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft aboard an Orbital Sciences Pegasus rocket will put the program's mobility to the test. That's because IBEX is launching from the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific -- thousands of miles away from the program's home base at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Before the launch managers and controllers can sit down at their consoles and put on their headsets on launch day, the Telemetry and Communications Group has to arrange for data, voice and video, and get the consoles set up and configured.

"We have a fully functional mobile system," says Eric Anderson, who leads the group as chief of the program's Ground Systems Integration Branch. Standing in the plush Mission Director's Center at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Hangar AE, he gestures at rows of polished wood consoles housing slick computer displays. "We can provide everything you see here on a desk out at Kwajalein. Instead of a comfortable console, you're sitting in front of a laptop computer with extra displays, but the capability is all there."

The Launch Services Program uses two primary launch sites: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. But mission requirements occasionally call for launches from other sites, such as Kodiak Island in Alaska, Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, and Kwajalein.

Anderson's office provides end-to-end support for spacecraft and launch vehicle customers, as well as the program itself, by ensuring all parties have the necessary data, voice and video communications to accomplish all prelaunch and launch-day operations. Examples include transmitting data between the launch site and the spacecraft's mission operations center during prelaunch testing, setting up and configuring controllers' consoles, and recording and displaying vehicle and spacecraft telemetry during liftoff and ascent.