The 500-pound spacecraft was designed and built for BMDO by the Naval Research Laboratory to test lightweight sensor hardware that might be useful in ballistic missile defense. The DSPSE spacecraft was launched in early 1994 and initially inserted into a lunar orbit to map the moon. While mapping the moon, Clementine scanned the lunar terrain and returned to Earth nearly 2 million separate images. Clementine was the first U.S. spacecraft to return to the moon since the Apollo era. The following year after mapping the moon, data gleaned from the spacecraft's radar sweep of the moon's south pole region suggested the presence of water in the form of ice.
Silver Engineering, Inc. was involved from the beginning of the Clementine program helping to define the mission's ground system architecture.
SEI Designed and Built
- The DSPSE Mission Operations Center (DMOC): Designed and built the fixed command and control center, being responsible for the ground telemetry and control architecture, room floor-plan, console and equipment designs and layouts, and connectivity of all components.
- DSPSE Command and Encoder Unit: Enabled the DSPSE ground stations to send BPSK uplink commands to the Clementine spacecraft.
- Telemetry Data Switch: Designed for the DMOC to provide for autonomous configurations of data signals within the operation center.
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