FLUG REVUE April 2005: Argentinian space programmes listed

April 2005

ARGENTINA IN SPACE

By Rudolf Hofstätter

State-owned centres in Argentina are building most of South America's own satellites, two of them with radar, and a new future satellite launcher of its own. The main focus of national practical applications of space technology are telecommunications, meteorological observation and remote sensing.

High-altitude exploration in the second largest state of South America was initiated in 1960, slightly ahead of Brazil, by the space commission CNIE. Thus, starting in 1962, meteorological rockets climbing to an altitude of up to 75km were launched from Chamical airbase in the province of La Rioje in the interior of the country and, from 1968, from Mar Chiquita on the Atlantic coast. High-altitude Rigel rockets also climbed to an altitude of 260km and the French Dragon to 430km.

From 1982 the military medium-range Condor II rocket was developed secretly by Argentina, Iraq and Egypt (where it was designated the Badr 2000), with the involvement of European companies like MBB of the Federal Republic of Germany plus other partners from Switzerland and Austria. Financed by Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt, rocket operations were established in Iraq and Egypt, to the consternation of Israel and Kuwait. Libya was also interested in Condor II. In 1988, Iraq broke away from the trio and continued work on its own. However, the country was unable to complete Badr-2000, and, according to the UN, all the parts were scrapped. Because of the approx. 1,000km range of the missile, the United Kingdom was also worried about the Falkland Islands.

In 1989, US President George Bush Senior demanded that the president of Argentina, Carlos Menem, should give up Condor II or else risk losing further loans from the USA. Additional obstacles to the rocket and its planned further development into a satellite launcher at the time were Argentina's economic crisis, hyperinflation and budget deficit. The Argentine Air Force university, which was involved in the construction of high-altitude rockets and Condor, in 1988 unveiled the short-range rocket, Alacran, which was used to test out parts for the satellite launcher in a series of launches from Chamical. A three-stage Argentine Condor II was to have carried small satellites weighing up to 200kg into Earth orbit by the end of the 1990s.

However, in 1990/91 the Condor II programme was scrapped without the rocket ever having been launched, “all” the parts were destroyed in Spain and the USA in 1993, and the secret rocket factory in Falda del Carmen, not far from the Argentine city of Cordoba, was dismantled. Several books featuring billions of dollars, Swiss bank accounts, espionage, the illegal transfer of technology, corruption and blackmail have appeared in Argentina on the subject of the Condor II thriller. At the beginning of 2000 the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in the USA reported that Egypt had very likely exported Condor technology to North Korea. On 14 May 2001, it reported that Egypt was still working on Badr-2000/Al Bader “with components from Germany via North Korea”.

For global communications, ground stations in Balcarce and Bosque Alegre in the province of Cordoba have maintained contact since the 1960s with INTELSAT and PANAMSAT geostationary satellites, in particular. The private Argentine communication system Nahuelsat, built by Aérospatiale, DASA and Alenia Spazio (now EADS) at the behest of the Menem government in 1992, has a ground station in Benavidez, not far from Buenos Aires. The geostationary satellite Nahuel 1 launched on 30 January 1997 with an Ariane 4 will continue to serve the whole of South America up to at least 2009 from a position of 71.8°W. One radio relay supplies the Spanish-speaking states of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, a second the Portuguese-speaking Brazil and a third radio relay serves Latin America and the southern states of the USA.

The Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales CONAE) in Buenos Aires, founded in 1991 and CNIE's successor, is subordinate to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The “Teofilo Tabanera” mission centre in Falda del Carmen manages the Cordoba ground station, named after the province, receiving antennae for Earth exploration satellites and US meteorological satellites, the flight control centre and the Mario Gulich Institute. The latter uses images and data from Landsat, SPOT, ERS, SAC amongst others for early warning and to deal with natural catastrophes, as well as to assess regional danger zones and endemic diseases that threaten the population, such as Hantavirus, dengue fever and malaria. Another ground station is operated in Ushuaia in the province of Tierra del Fuego near Cape Horn.

Even before Brazil's first small satellite SCD 1 was launched in the USA on a Pegasus rocket in 1993, the provincial government of Cordoba and the Argentine Air Force commissioned Argentine companies to construct the µSat Viktor test satellite (µ stands for “microsatellite”). As the first Argentine satellite, it was launched on 29 August 1996 in Plesetsk, Russia on a Molniya-M rocket, delivering images of Earth to the Cordoba ground station and relaying data between radio stations up to the beginning of 1998. The Satelite de Aplicaciones Cientificas (SAC) series of satellites were jointly initiated at the beginning of the 1990s by CONAE and NASA. At that time, NASA selected the INVAP S.E. company in Bariloche, which is owned by the province of Rio Negro, as the main industrial partner for the ground stations, satellites and Argentine payload.

The small SAC-B was the first CONAE satellite to be launched, on 4 November 1996 on Wallops Island on a Pegasus XL, with the aim of delivering astrophysical data on solar eruptions and outbreaks of gamma radiation in the universe. However, SAC-B was unable to achieve separation from the rocket once in orbit, so that the mission failed. At the next attempt, on 14 December 1998, the 268kg SAC-A test satellite was successfully launched into orbit during the STS-88 Space Shuttle Endeavour mission. Its camera photographed the Earth for eight months. Argentine silicon solar cells were also tested, and the migration of the endangered whale population of the South Atlantic was electronically monitored.

STS-95 and STS-101 transported experiments of Argentine schoolchildren and students in the autumn of 1998 and the spring of 2000, respectively, in the canister of the shuttle loading bay. With the STS-108 loading bay canister in the autumn 2001, Argentine physicists investigated surface tensions in liquid water, crystal growth and simulated movement of the atmosphere and oceans for geophysical models. Fernando Caldeiro, an Argentine by birth, has been a US astronaut since 1996.

A multi-spectral scanner and cameras of the SAC-C are currently transmitting information for the agriculture, water supply and distribution and forestry of Argentina. INVAP is meanwhile preparing the 1.5 tonne SAOCOM-1A for launch in 2005. This will be the first Latin American satellite to be equipped with an Argentine synthetic aperture radar with an antenna 10 metres long by 2.5 metres. This will be followed in 2006 by SAOCOM-1B, equipped with the same radar.

From 2007 it is hoped that SAC-D/Aquarius, developed jointly by CONAE and NASA and also following a polar orbit, will make possible the preparation of the first global maps of salt concentrations in the surface of the sea, helping scientists to establish how the oceans transport heat and whether salt affects climate change. NASA, France, Italy, Denmark and Belgium have all contributed to the CONAE satellite payloads. Brazil was also involved in the preparations for SAC-E, and Algeria in preliminary work on SAC-F.

In 1995, in compliance with the rules of non-proliferation and the “Missile Technology Control Regime”, preparations got under way for the new “Vehiculo de Nueva Generacion” (VENG) satellite launcher, whose images and data are still secret. Financed by a mixture of state and private business, ten Argentine institutions constructed the parts. For example, the Bariloche nuclear energy centre supplies the liquid fuel monomethyl hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide and the engine. It was tested in Villa Maria, Cordoba, jointly with the Air Force university, which is currently building the 3.4m long Tronador 1 test rocket. This is to be used to test VENG components when launched in Chamical. The guidance system is calibrated as the reusable payload of a Brazilian high-altitude rocket VS 30 and integrated into the larger Tronador 2 test rocket. Thus, there is still some way to go before the maiden launch of the satellite launcher.

From page 74 of FLUG REVUE 4/2005

Last updated 15 March 2005

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