The NASA Sounding Rocket Operations Contract (NSROC) Program was privatized in February 1999 at NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, USA. Northrop Grumman (previously Litton PRC) and Orbital Sciences Corporation teamed together (along with Boeing, Arcata and RSS) in securing the Sounding Rocket contract. NSROC provides a complete full turnkey sounding rocket program that includes mission definition, design, development, fabrication, assembly, integration, test, launch and post-flight analysis for NASA's Sounding Rocket program. Since the contract start in 1999, NSROC has completed 140 Sounding Rocket flights as of 23 May 2005. These missions have supported science disciplines in Geospace, Solar/Heliospheric, High Energy Astrophysics, UV/Optical Astrophysics, Solar System Exploration, Student Outreach and Technology Innovation demonstrations. Launches are performed from world-wide launch ranges including Wallops Island Flight Facility Virginia, White Sands Missile Range New Mexico, Poker Flat Alaska, Esrange Sweden, And0ya & Svalbard Norway, Barking Sands Hawaii, Pacific Missile Range Facility, Alcantara Brazil, Vandenberg AFB California, Eastern Test Range Florida, amongst others. The summer of 2004 eclipsed a successful remote campaign from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Fourteen rockets took part in a mid-equatorial ionosphere research that had provided a plethora of rich and exciting science data from that region. The success of the NSROC program is due to our large talent pool of experienced engineers and technicians along with a large inventory of rocket motors/hardware and flight proven components, subsystems and systems. The NSROC program enjoys a rich heritage of many high fidelity subsystem designs. The NSROC Attitude Control Systems are an excellent example of high resolution, low cost and high reliability. Pointing accuracies of sub arc-second (0.2 arc-second) are common for the solar and celestial ACS systems flown on the NSROC Program. New developments within the NASA Sounding Rocket Program have increased inertial attitude control pointing system accuracies by 300%. The future is bright and well within a legitimate technological reach.
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