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QUIKSCAT
NASA's Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) was lofted into space at 7:15 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on June 19, 1999 atop a U.S. Air Force Titan II launch vehicle from Space Launch Complex 4 West at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. The SeaWinds on QuikSCAT mission is a "quick recovery" mission to fill the gap created by the loss of data from the NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT), when the satellite it was flying on lost power in June 1997. The SeaWinds instrument on the QuikSCAT satellite is a specialized microwave radar that measures near-surface wind speed and direction under all weather and cloud conditions over Earth's oceans. Mission Partners include: * National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) * NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) * Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation * U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center * Honeywell Satellite Systems Operations * Raytheon E-Systems Corporation * Lockheed Martin Astronautics * Hughes Electron Dynamics Division The SeaWinds/QuikSCAT project is managed for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology. For more information on QuikSCAT and SeaWinds, see: "http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/quikindex.html" For more information on Earth Science Enterprise, see: "http://earth.nasa.gov/"