LEAST payload for MOST?

(Laura Halliday) wrote in message . com...
(Kieran A. Carroll) wrote in message . com...

The paper in question will be published in Nature on July 1. The date
was chosen by Nature as being the first anniversary of MOST's launch;
it'll also make for a nice birthday present for Canada, in return for
the CDN$10M that Canada spent on MOST :-) There will be a press
conference associated with this (either at UBC in Vancouver, or at CSA
in Montreal, TBD), on June 30; I'm hoping to be there...

So what ever happened to the amateur payload on MOST?

Hi, Laura!

Alas for the LEAST payload (AMSAT's acronym: Lots of Extra Amateur
Stuff on the Telescope :-), the AMSAT/NA guys backed out around
mid-2001. I recall this was for 2 reasons. One was that MOST was on a
tight schedule (aiming for a 2002 launch at that point), and the AMSAT
guys behind LEAST weren't comfortable to committing to have their
payload ready in time for integration with the ret of the satellite.
The other was that the LEAST team had become involved in another AMSAT
flight project (darned if I can remember which, though...perhaps
up-front work on Echo?), which was taking up an increasing amount of
their time and attention (thus contributing to reason #1).

We tried to find a replacement payload, but between the (then) tight
schedule and the amount of time it takes to get anything new
scoped-out/funded/done, this also didn't happen. So, MOST flew with an
empty tray :-( (Actually, this ended up being the tray that got
signed by those on hand at that point.)

Ironically, just after irrevocably making the decision to fly the
LEAST tray empty, we started running into integration and testing
issues, which pushed the launch date out several months. Then, the
launch vehicle provider pushed us out another 6 months, due to a slip
in schedule for one of their other payloads. Total slip from that
point was a year; we would have had plenty of time to sneak in an
auxiliary payload, had the impending slip become apparent a couple of
months earlier! (However, in hindsight, it's just as well that we
didn't...MOST already had enough electronics units in it to make the
integration and test process very lengthy, and required a lot from the
AI&T staff...if we'd had yet anohter complex payload, it would have
almost certainly distracted them from focusing on getting the core
elements of the mission tested thoroughly before launch.)

- Kieran