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

Shit..

[leifm]

And I thought I was pissed when I dropped my iBook...

This Kinda thing

[KMAPSRULE]

happens so often its only a matter of time before it really hurts someone:

First, technicians from another satellite program... removed the bolts...without proper documentation.
several programs I have worked on have had near accidents because parts were "borrowed" without redtags being applied. Second, the NOAA team working today failed to follow the procedure to verify the configuration of the NOAA "turn over cart" since they had used it a few days earlier.

Complacency(sp?) Happens way to often in every job environment. And it takes a lot of discipline to force yourself to follow the procedures everytime day in/day out and beyond.

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".