Experiment, Spartan 101

Also known as Spartan A, Spartan 1, and Spartan 101-F1, this is the flight model of the Shuttle Pointed Autonomous Research Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN). First flown on June 17, 1985, aboard STS 64, Spartan was deployed from the Shuttle bay and recovered some 45.5 hours later. Two X-ray proportional counters were mounted on the first Spartan flight, built by Gilbert Fritz from the Naval Research Laboratory. Consistent with Spartan's mission to provide low-cost short duration payload capacities to replace NASA's suborbital space science program, this payload was flown previously on a sounding rocket. Spartan provided on-board internal tape recording for data and 3-axis stabilization accurate to +/- 3 arc minutes, as well as aspect cameras and elecrtronics on a single optical bench. Observations during this mission resulted in a series of research papers on the Perseus Cluster of galaxies as well as on the nature of the X-ray source at the center of our galaxy,