The Atlas/Centaur lightning strike incident

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
On March 26, 1987, an Atlas/Centaur 67 vehicle carrying a naval communication satellite was launched at 1622:00.768 EST from pad 36B of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The meteorological conditions at the time were typical of wintertime storms with heavy overcast, moderate rain, and occasional scattered lightning activity. The NASA Investigation Board determined that, at approximately 48 s into the flight, the vehicle was struck by a triggered, cloud‐to‐ground lightning flash, comprised of at least four return strokes. The resulting lightning current apparently coupled a transient signal into the wiring of the Centaur digital computer unit (DCU), which caused a change in one memory location. The altered memory was associated with the computation of the Atlas engine yaw commands and caused the DCU to issue a hardover engine gimbal command. This resulted in an excessive angle of attack, large dynamic loads, and the breakup of the Atlas/Centaur 67 vehicle. The paper represents a case study of meteorological conditions at the time of launch and of the lightning flash triggered by the Atlas/Centaur 67 vehicle. This is based on comprehensive analyses of the cause of the incident by the NASA Investigation Board.

This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit: