The subject says "commercial" sattelite, but I prefer the
term "scientific". The project is to measure the magnetic
field around Earth.


Michael:

> > The Danish built satellite "?rsted" was finally launched
>                              ^^^^^^^^
> DAvid, can you get an English equivalent of that Danish character?
> I want to put this on the education site. My guess is that it's Ae,
> but I'd like to be sure.

It's "Ørsted" ("Ørsted" for HTML-coders).

> > after 10 attempts.  The satellite got a free ride on board
> > a Delta II rocket launched from the Vandenberg air base in
> > California.
>
> Nice! Can we assume that the 9 failed attempts were not software-
> related? I can just see it: "Ada software finally succeeds after
> 9 failures.":-)

It was launched in the 11th try February 23rd 1999 at
10:29:55 GMT. The delays were all caused by bad weather.
There has been one computer failure during data
transsmission but after resetting the computer everything
has worked fine. The staff at Terma/CRI are (according to
Danish radio thursday) still searching for the cause of the
failure.

[...]

> Yep, just another routine, everyday Ada success.:-)

They even mentioned that they used Ada for the software in
the radio interview (now we just need somebody to ask what
this Ada-thing is).

The sattelite control centre is in a small office in
Birkerød outside Copenhagen (no big fancy stuff like in the
movies :-), and the data processing is done at the Danish
Institute of Meteorology.

Greetings,

Jacob

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