ES-MCAT Mirror Shipping Crate

The Orbital Debris Program Office (ODPO) at NASA Johnson Space Center operates and maintains the 1.3-m ES-MCAT telescope at Ascension Island Auxiliary Airfield (AAF). The primary objective of the ES-MCAT mission is to extend observations of orbital debris in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) to smaller/fainter objects than can be tracked by the Department of Defense (DoD). The current mirror coating has suffered rapid degradation due to a combination of environmental effects.

Therefore, the mirror needs to be recoated as soon as possible and earlier than expected due to the poor quality of the coating that was previously applied. After the mirror has been recoated by Viavi Solutions, it needs to be shipped back to Ascension Island. The original shipping container degraded severely upon arrival at Viavi’s location and it is no longer useable. The vendor will now be required to rebuild a new container that will fit the mirror and be able to withstand up to 30g’s of force.

The rationale supporting the use of 10 U.S.C. 3204(a)1 is because Viavi is the only known source available that has the requisite knowledge, experience, staff, tooling, and capacity to meet the requirement of both recoating it to the prescribed specifications and building the necessary shipping container.

Viavi already has the mirror in its possession and it is the only vendor available to handle the mirror and maneuver it into a new container without disrupting the clean room environment the mirror must be stored in after it is recoated. Introducing a new company at this juncture introduces unknown contaminants into the cleanroom environment, which could introduce unknown contaminants onto the mirror surface after it has been recoated.

In order for Viavi to guarantee a perfect coating, it must be the vendor that maintains control of the mirror, which also means controlling the manufacturing of the shipping container and the transfer of the mirror into the new container.