"We are elated about the successful launch and early commissioning of QuikSCAT," said Donald W. Vanlandingham, president and CEO of Ball Aerospace. "QuikSCAT, with its tight turnaround schedule, was a challenge for us and proves what teams working together can accomplish. This effort took complete support from not only our employees, but also those at Goddard and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as our suppliers. Now it's time for the world to benefit from the science data that will be returned."

QuikSCAT, built by Ball Aerospace in approximately 11 months-an industry record for a spacecraft of this size-is also the first launch of a satellite using NASA's rapid spacecraft acquisition (RSA) procurement process to reduce the time, and thus the cost, traditionally necessary to acquire satellite systems.

Ball Aerospace provided the QuikSCAT spacecraft bus, launch interface systems, system integration, test and launch support. The company will also perform two years of mission operations with the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics as subcontractor.

This 1,910-pound (fueled) satellite carries a 450-pound payload - the SeaWinds scatterometer built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In a near-polar orbit with a ground speed of 6.6 km (4 miles) per second, QuikSCAT will circle the Earth every 100 minutes at a distance of 800 km (500 miles) during its projected two-year mission. The scatterometer, whose principal investigator is Dr. Michael Freilich from Oregon State University, will record sea-surface wind speed and direction data for global climate research, collecting approximately 400,000 measurements daily.

The QuikSCAT mission, launched June 19 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Lompoc, Calif., replaces NSCAT on Japan's Advanced Earth Observing Satellite (ADEOS), which failed in June 1997. QuikSCAT is managed by JPL for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, and is part of a long-term, coordinated research effort to study the total Earth system and the effects of natural and human-induced changes in the environment. QuikSCAT was launched aboard a Titan II launch vehicle built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver.