1 00:00:01,350 --> 00:00:03,720 Unboxing 2 00:00:03,740 --> 00:00:05,630 a new 3 00:00:05,650 --> 00:00:08,280 NASA spacecraft 4 00:00:08,300 --> 00:00:08,980 5 00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:11,530 Hey everyone, we’re here with Steve Turek from Orbital ATK. 6 00:00:11,550 --> 00:00:15,080 Something is about to happen that we haven’t shown here at NASA yet. 7 00:00:15,100 --> 00:00:19,730 What you’re seeing behind us is the unboxing of the ICON spacecraft. 8 00:00:19,750 --> 00:00:23,700 We’ve shipped it from Gilbert, Arizona and we brought it here 9 00:00:23,720 --> 00:00:26,380 to the launch processing facility here at Vandenberg Air Force Base. 10 00:00:26,400 --> 00:00:30,120 Now, ICON is the Ionospheric Connection Explorer. 11 00:00:30,140 --> 00:00:30,590 That’s correct. 12 00:00:30,610 --> 00:00:33,280 And that’s going to be studying the upper atmosphere. 13 00:00:33,300 --> 00:00:38,420 It’s going to give us an understanding of our weather in our atmosphere and spatial weather. 14 00:00:38,440 --> 00:00:42,860 We don’t quite have a handle on what’s going on up there in the ionosphere. 15 00:00:42,880 --> 00:00:45,590 So this will give us an opportunity to understand that. 16 00:00:45,610 --> 00:00:48,680 Now this is not a very big spacecraft in terms of what we normally think of satellites. 17 00:00:48,700 --> 00:00:51,480 That’s correct because it’s going inside a Pegasus rocket. 18 00:00:51,500 --> 00:00:54,120 And what is that Pegasus XL? 19 00:00:54,140 --> 00:01:02,740 It is an Orbital ATK rocket that gets integrated to the bottom of its L-1011. 20 00:01:02,760 --> 00:01:09,140 It’ll go to a launch box. It’ll be dropped and then the motors will ignite and it will put it in its orbit. 21 00:01:09,160 --> 00:01:12,730 Now I understand what they’re going to do is that they’ve just taken off the top portion of the box. 22 00:01:12,750 --> 00:01:17,350 And why did they take it off in sections as a opposed to just taking all off at once? 23 00:01:17,370 --> 00:01:20,510 As you can see there’s a sub-structure underneath the shipping container lid. 24 00:01:20,530 --> 00:01:26,650 Now that sub-structure is a melinex-type cover with an aluminum sub-structure 25 00:01:26,670 --> 00:01:30,480 that inside there its being purged to keep ICON very clean. 26 00:01:30,500 --> 00:01:33,520 We want to be able to have eyes on that sub-structure 27 00:01:33,540 --> 00:01:37,480 so we don’t bind up when we’re lifting the lower pieces of the lid. 28 00:01:37,500 --> 00:01:40,300 Alright, Steve. I think we’re getting ready to lift the second half here. 29 00:01:40,320 --> 00:01:42,820 We are. It looks like they have succeeded. 30 00:01:42,840 --> 00:01:44,530 They’re just going around. They’re looking at the perimeter 31 00:01:44,550 --> 00:01:48,750 to make sure there’s no hang ups and they’ll just continue forward lifting it up. 32 00:01:48,770 --> 00:01:51,960 And of course, they’re lifting it very slowly to make sure they’re not going to hit the spacecraft. 33 00:01:51,980 --> 00:01:56,440 That’s correct. And it looks very good at this point. 34 00:01:56,460 --> 00:02:03,960 The crane has three speeds - really fast, fast, and a micro-slow speed. 35 00:02:03,980 --> 00:02:06,530 And right now it’s on a micro-slow speed. 36 00:02:06,550 --> 00:02:09,650 And this will take a few minutes before they can get to the point where they can remove it. 37 00:02:09,670 --> 00:02:16,840 So just, for the first time you are seeing an unboxing of an actual NASA satellite. How cool is that. 38 00:02:16,860 --> 00:02:22,250 You can see the silver covers at the bottom, those are the solar ray panels. 39 00:02:22,270 --> 00:02:25,350 The solar rays provide power for the observatory. 40 00:02:25,370 --> 00:02:30,730 At the bottom of the shipping container, you can see a little black box. 41 00:02:30,750 --> 00:02:31,720 Okay. 42 00:02:31,740 --> 00:02:36,460 That black box is a shock recorder, so during transit we can monitor, 43 00:02:36,480 --> 00:02:40,140 we will be able to download the data from that little box 44 00:02:40,160 --> 00:02:44,000 and it will tell us how much shock the observatory saw during its shipment. 45 00:02:44,020 --> 00:02:47,340 That's a good point, so you drove this on a truck 46 00:02:47,360 --> 00:02:50,340 to California to take it to Vandenberg, but if it hits a pothole, 47 00:02:50,360 --> 00:02:52,500 if it hits, you know, something that, that really 48 00:02:52,520 --> 00:02:59,190 Yeah, there's speed bumps at the truck weighing stations that we try to avoid, 49 00:02:59,210 --> 00:03:04,090 so there's limited -- I mean it's a soft ride environmentally controlled truck. 50 00:03:04,110 --> 00:03:08,120 We don't think there are any issues during the shipment, 51 00:03:08,140 --> 00:03:13,310 but we do have it instrumented to provide that objective evidence that nothing was done during the shipment. 52 00:03:13,330 --> 00:03:20,050 This is probably a dumb question, but, you know, a lot of these unboxings, the person gets to play with it. 53 00:03:20,070 --> 00:03:24,180 You know, you open up the box and I get to play with the phone. Can we go play with the spacecraft? 54 00:03:24,200 --> 00:03:28,200 No, no you can't play with the spacecraft. However, the spacecraft will play with us. 55 00:03:28,220 --> 00:03:36,720 So once we get it inside the clean room, we will instrument it with EGSE, and we'll do a post-shipment test. 56 00:03:36,740 --> 00:03:37,360 What's EGSE? 57 00:03:37,380 --> 00:03:43,960 Electrical ground support equipment. Okay. 58 00:03:43,980 --> 00:03:49,610 So Steve, this is another part where we're bringing another piece of apparatus to attach to the spacecraft. 59 00:03:49,630 --> 00:03:55,850 Yeah, this is the actual fixture that's going to lift ICON off of its shipping container base. 60 00:03:55,870 --> 00:03:57,850 It's called a vertical lift sling. Okay. 61 00:03:57,870 --> 00:04:03,010 It's a very critical lift. At this point, this is where you're actually lifting the observatory, 62 00:04:03,030 --> 00:04:08,140 the flight hardware, the $40 million-plus piece, off the ground 63 00:04:08,160 --> 00:04:13,480 onto this high stand for all the close-out and testing activities inside the tank A-10.  64 00:04:13,500 --> 00:04:16,330 Now the cool thing about this is, we don't get to show this on a normal basis. 65 00:04:16,350 --> 00:04:19,570 This is a first. I mean, to actually see a critical lift of a spacecraft 66 00:04:19,590 --> 00:04:22,540 being lifted off from the platform onto its -- what's this called again? 67 00:04:22,560 --> 00:04:25,040 This is the integration high stand. 68 00:04:25,060 --> 00:04:31,240 Yeah so, this is going to be an awesome sight to see. This is the first time, so I'm excited. 69 00:04:31,260 --> 00:04:35,080 Now, one of the things that I noticed for the folks who are in the bunny suits, 70 00:04:35,100 --> 00:04:40,190 they have a device that's attached from their suit to a hard point. What is that for?  71 00:04:40,210 --> 00:04:42,280 That's an ESD ground strap. Okay. 72 00:04:42,300 --> 00:04:47,970 So it not only protects the hardware from an ESD event -- electrostatic discharge event -- 73 00:04:47,990 --> 00:04:51,890 it also protects the operator, 74 00:04:51,910 --> 00:04:58,100 so if there was any surge of power coming back to the operator it would be filtered or absorbed by that. 75 00:04:58,120 --> 00:05:03,900 And it would be a bad day if they weren't wearing those, and they did have a static discharge on the spacecraft? 76 00:05:03,920 --> 00:05:09,300 If it had the potential to do life-threatening damage to them, yes. 77 00:05:09,320 --> 00:05:18,640 Well, Steve, thank you so much for joining us. You've seen the first unveiling of a NASA satellite, ICON -- the Ionospheric Connection Explorer.  78 00:05:18,660 --> 00:05:26,540