Lockheed Martin Drops NOAA Satellite

An anonymous reader writes "Last Saturday, engineers at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale were rotating the NOAA-N spacecraft from vertical to horizontal when it slipped and fell - hard. SpaceRef has the story and a graphic photo of the damaged satellite."

Comments

Re:They're lucky

[hey!]

Plus the propellant system was pressurized which apparently presents some risk to techicians simply going in and messing around with the thing right now. Anyone know whey propellant was loaded in a craft that isn't scheduled to launch for five years? Perhaps the propulsion system was being pressure tested with an inert gas or something.

Re:Can anybody explain the accident more clearly?

[Ahotasu]

I'll give it a go.

First, note that spacecraft (S/C) are rotated from vertical to horizontal positions very very slowly For smaller S/C, hand-cranked carts are used, but from the pictures, I think this one used a motor, which may have taken longer to "adjust" when the techs noted the problem (the S/C slipping from the plate before the fall).

In the photo you see on the linked page, the turn-over cart is the large white structure located on the far right of the picture. The large ring is the base where the 24 missing bolts should have been. This interfaces with (most likely, I'm guessing here) the S/C launch vehicle adapter ring, which is probably the slightly flared chrome-colored cylinder at the base of the S/C (again, on the right of the picture).

You can't tell from the picture posted, but I've seen pictures that show the ring is (only) roughly 5-10 degrees from horizontal. The ring itself, when horizontal is about 3 feet above the floor. Doubtless, what happened is that, as the plate (and therefore S/C) was rotated, the S/C started to slip off of the plate, striking the turn-over cart and then rotating over into its fatal dive.

This is similar to how other S/C are handled, at least in my experience. It is also interesting to note that some physical S/C moves are videotaped and have significant quality assurance checkoffs. This may be limited to lifts (think crane), and vibration tests, and not "simple" turn-over maneuvers, and I'd bet this isn't the first time this turn-over cart was used, nor the first time this S/C was turned. I wonder if there are videos floating around? I'd sure as heck find it interesting to see the turn-over procedure and see where they checked off the step saying "check bolts".