The new millennium program EO-1 mission and spacecraft design concept

Earth Orbiter 1 (EO-1) is the first in a series of Earth Orbiter spacecraft for NASA's New Millennium Program (NMP). Government, academia and industry have been teamed together to develop the EO-1 spacecraft. The mission, instruments, NMP technologies, and spacecraft subsystems are discussed. The remote sensing science instruments which will be flown on the EO-1 spacecraft are the Advanced Land Imager and the Atmospheric Corrector. The NMP technologies planned for spaceflight validation by EO-1 include an X-band phased array antenna, a pulsed plasma thruster, a high-rate fiber optic data bus, a lightweight flexible solar array, formation flight with Landsat-7, and carbon-carbon thermal radiators. The data subsystem contains several new technologies. Other subsystems include attitude control, power, RF communications, structure and mechanisms, and thermal subsystem. The EO-1 mission is a good example of the faster-better-cheaper philosophy that NASA has adopted for its spacecraft, and paves the way for constructing future spacecraft in the new millennium.