HETE

Comtech AeroAstro built the High Energy Transient Experiment (HETE) spacecraft for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with scientific cooperation from teams in the United States, France, and Japan. Its mission was detection and observation of high-energy events in the gamma ray, X-ray, and UV spectra. HETE, a pathfinder for the NASA University Explorer (UNEX) program, was launched on a Pegasus XL on November 4, 1996 with the SAC-B satellite. It was lost due to a launch failure and rebuilt as HETE-2 (based on the original design), which was successfully launched in 2000.

Comtech AeroAstro supplied the spacecraft bus (55 kg bus mass, 120 kg total mass) and ground stations, and performed all payload integration and testing. In flight, the spacecraft oriented the fixed solar arrays toward the sun with instruments pointing in the anti-sun direction. Its communications system used a 230 kbit/second data downlink rate and a 7.5 kbit/second uplink rate. The power system supplied 67W average power at a nominal 28V to the payload.