AeroAstro Ships STPSat-1

Ashburn, VA, November 30, 2006— AeroAstro, Inc. today announced the successful completion of the Pre-Ship Review on the STPSat-1 satellite by the Air Force. The low-earth-orbiting STPSat-1 space vehicle has been developed under contract to the Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program (STP) headquartered at Kirtland AFB, and is the first STP mission specifically designed to fly space experiments on the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA). STPSat-1 has been shipped to Cape Canaveral for integration to the ESPA prior to a scheduled 2007 Atlas launch. “We are pleased to achieve this critical milestone in the STPSat-1 program,” said Dr. Rick Fleeter, President and CEO of AeroAstro. “STPSat-1 demonstrates how capable microsatellites have become, and the newest launch resource for microspace, the ESPA launch system. The benefits of microspace – lower cost, higher reliability, reduced schedule and greater contact for the user with the payload and data – will continue to grow through these improvements in spacecraft engineering and infrastructure. AeroAstro is proud to be a part of these Space Test Program initiatives.” Over the next several weeks, a team of engineers from Boeing, Lockheed Martin and AeroAstro will work together to integrate the satellite with the ESPA and launch vehicle, and perform a series of tests and inspections to ensure that the combined systems of the satellite and rocket are working properly. The fully integrated STPSat-1 spacecraft being shipped today hosts two experiments. The primary experiment, Spatial Heterodyne Imager for Mesospheric Radicals (SHIMMER), is a high-resolution ultraviolet spectrometer based on the new optical technique known as Spatial Heterodyne Spectroscopy (SHS). SHS facilitates the design of low mass, low power, high throughput spectrometers for space-based remote sensing. The secondary experiment Computerized Ionospheric Tomography Receiver in Space (CITRIS) CITRIS will investigate irregularities that affect propagation of satellite-to-ground links for GPS and communications.

This project is sponsored by:

United States Air Force
Air Force Space Command
Space Development and Test Wing
Space and Missile System Center
Kirtland AFB, New Mexico 87117-5778

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Contact:
Brenda Gravelle
Director, Space Marketing
AeroAstro, Inc.
(303) 873-1419