Fred Brown/Jim Sahli						Oct. 16, 1995
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(Phone:  301/286-7277/0697)


RELEASE: 95-200

NASA'S POLAR SPACECRAFT SHIPPED TO LAUNCH SITE 

	NASA's Polar spacecraft is being shipped to its launch site in 
California Oct. 16 from it's manufacturer, Lockheed-Martin, in East 
Windsor, N.J.  The Polar mission,  which is currently scheduled for 
launch Dec. 9 from Vandenberg AFB in California,. will measure the 
entry and transport of solar plasma over the Earth's magnetic poles 
and observe the energy exchange between the magnetosphere and 
the ionosphere above the upper atmosphere by providing global 
imaging of the northern aurora.
	
	The satellite has completed its environmental testing program 
and is being flown to its Vandenberg launch site by an Air Force C-5 
aircraft from McGuire AFB in New Jersey.

	"It is great to see the spacecraft shipped to the West Coast 
after several years of pulling the platform together," said Joe Dezio, 
manager of the Global Geospace Science  (GGS) Project in 
Goddard's Flight Projects Directorate.

	"With a successful launch this December, we will then have a 
second GGS spacecraft in orbit to gather important information for 
NASA's space physics research programs," said Dezio.  The first is 
the Wind satellite which was launched Nov. 1, 1994 to measure solar 
wind properties at great distances from Earth.

	The Polar spacecraft, carrying 11 instruments, is scheduled 
for launch on a Delta II rocket from the Western Space and Missile 
Center, Lompoc, Calif. Its orbit around the Earth will be inclined 
approximately 86 degrees from the equator. The furthest point from 
the Earth on the orbit -- the apogee --will be nine Earth radii (36,000 
miles or 57,000 kilometers), and the closest point to Earth -- the 
perigee -- will be almost 2 Earth radii (7,000 miles or 11,000 
kilometers).
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	Polar is a spin-stabilized cylinder-shaped spacecraft 7.87 feet 
(2.4 meters) in diameter and 8.2 feet (2.56) meters high. The dry 
weight of the spacecraft is about 2,198 pounds (997 kilograms) with 
an additional 662 pounds (301 kilograms) of hydrazine propellant for 
orbit and attitude control. The design life of Polar is three years.

	Several NASA and Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) 
facilities will play key roles in the collection and dissemination of 
Polar science data. The NASA Deep Space Network will be used to 
command the spacecraft and collect Polar science data via radio link. 
At GSFC, raw data will be processed, organized and stored. The 
Central Data Handling Facility will produce "key parameters" for 
surveying the much larger volume of raw data. 

	"Detailed analysis of the data will be performed by 
investigators at their own sites and the data will be shared through 
NASA Science Internet connections throughout the United States, 
Japan and Europe," said Dr. Bob Hoffman, deputy GGS project 
scientist for the Polar mission.

       Goddard manages the Polar spacecraft for the Office of Space 
Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D. C.

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EDITOR'S NOTE:  For additional information about the Polar 
mission, information is available on the World Wide Web at the 
following Internet address:

http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/ISTP/polar.html