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John Bluck Dec. 17, 2006

NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

650-604-5026

E-mail: <jbluck@mail.arc.nasa.gov>

**MISSION STATUS REPORT: 06-95AR (issued 4:15 p.m. PST)**

**NASA\'S ORBITING GENESAT-1 RADIOS DATA TO TEAM ON EARTH**

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. - NASA\'s GeneSat-1 satellite continues to orbit
Earth, and researchers are receiving radioed data from the spacecraft.
It was launched Saturday,

Dec. 16, 2006, from NASA\'s Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.

GeneSat-1 is a 10-pound satellite carrying bacteria inside a miniature
laboratory to study how the microbes may respond in spaceflight.
GeneSat-1 was a secondary payload on an Air Force four-stage Minotaur 1
rocket that also delivered the Air Force TacSat 2 satellite to orbit.

GeneSat-1 was designed and built at NASA\'s Ames Research Center,
Moffett Field, Calif., and the mission is being managed from the center.
John Hines, GeneSat-1 project manager at NASA Ames, has been providing
e-mail updates about the spacecraft. Here are some excerpts from his
messages:

6:28 p.m. PST, Dec. 16, 2006, John Hines wrote:

My team has worked for the past 12 days nonstop to support this launch
and ops startup from multiple locations. The universities are conducting
mission ops, and we have all been up and on task non-stop since 3 a.m.
PST this morning, and will be again on ops tasks from 2 a.m. tonight,
onward. . . .

At 19:32 -0800 12/16/06, Mike McIntyre wrote:

154 unique beacon packets were sent in from all over the United States
and the world (including Brazil and Japan) during our first day of
operations. This data spans about three hours, and the statistics are as
follows. We need more data to draw firm conclusions, but this is a good
first look. This basically repeats what is on SCU\'s dashboard:

<http://genesat1.engr.scu.edu/dashboard/index.htm>

(Notice that the Mean Solar Panel Temperature has been changed to 0
degrees C. after more analysis).

It is very exciting to see all these beacon packets coming in from all
over.

\-\--Mike

GeneSat Status as of 3:58 a.m. PST, Dec. 17, 2006 (per verbal from Chris
Kitts):

I\'m happy to report that we\'ve now received 2.4Ghz transceiver data,
and are now pulling down some of the archived housekeeping data from
both bus and payload. We have several more passes at approximately
90-minute intervals until around 8 a.m. PST. We will discuss our results
to date with our Ops and Science team at our 9 a.m. PST internal Ops
telcon today, and assess our functional status.

If all goes well, and the GeneSat is stable enough. (G, temperature, and
ambient pressure); we may be able to initiate our biological experiment
as early as Sunday evening (Dec. 17, 2006) or Monday (Dec. 18, 2006).

End of e-mail excerpts.

Earlier, Hines explained, \"During this mission, we are exposing
bacteria to the space environment to see how they are affected.\"
GeneSat-1\'s onboard micro-laboratory includes sensors and optical
systems that can detect proteins that are the products of specific
genetic activity.

The GeneSat-1 ground control station at NASA Ames will receive data
radioed from the micro-laboratory after it has completed its
observations and tests of the bacteria inside. The biological test will
last only 96 hours, but the GeneSat-1 team will evaluate the stability
of the orbiting payload\'s systems for four months to a year.

-more-

-2-

The Small Spacecraft Office at NASA\'s Ames teamed up with industry and
local universities to develop the fully automated, miniature GeneSat
spaceflight system that provides life support for small living things.

\"GeneSat is the first of many small spacecraft and missions being
developed and managed in the NASA Ames Small Spacecraft Office, which
has been established to specifically demonstrate the capability to
rapidly develop and deploy small, low-cost spacecraft missions and
flight systems,\" Hines observed.

For more information about GeneSat-1, please visit:

[**http://tia.arc.nasa.gov/genesat1/**](http://tia.arc.nasa.gov/genesat1/)

Publication-size images are available at:

[**http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/multimedia/images/2006/genebox.html**](http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/multimedia/images/2006/genebox.html)

-end-

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