The QuikSCAT spacecraft was the first spacecraft procured through NASA's Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition initiative. A wind field scattermoeter provided by JPL was integrated onto a commercial remote sensing bus that was already in development. QuikSCAT was launched on June 20, 1999 from VAFB using a Titan booster into a nominal 800x260 km orbit. Spacecraft initialization activities proceeded rapidly and nominally. All ADCS initialization was completed, and the first orbit raising burn performed less than four days after launch. The spacecraft was placed into its final 800 km frozen orbit about 18 days after launch using a series of 24 burns, totaling approximately 4 hours of thrusting with 1-1b thrusters. During this time, the ADCS performed nominally, except for a couple flight software/star tracker timing bugs which were discovered, diagnosed, and repaired via software loads. Pointing performance is well within the 0.05-degree (3-sigma) knowledge requirement.
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