What Is This Object on the Titan Rocket?

  • Thread starter Integral
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Doh! I`m soo Stoopid!
 
Spacecraft with gold foil insulation and blue solar panels mounted on a circular adapter ring, with a technician in white cleanroom suit working beside it in a large hangar.


This should be easy. But, what's under the floor?
 
The rest of the payload mate?
 
Close enough. Actually it's on the launch pad on top of a Titan rocket. It's a DMSP satellite (a low orbiting weather satellite). The flat panels on the side are the solar array panels folded around the satellite. The red circles are covers on the transmitting antennas on the bottom of the satellite.

I used to control those back in the eighties and early nineties. Kind of a fun job. Being low orbiters, a tracking station couldn't see the satellite for very long. Whenever anything went wrong it was like the two-minute drills in the NFL, since it would be over an hour before you could talk to the satellite again.