Pointing mechanisms for the Shuttle Radar Laboratory

The Shuttle Radar Laboratory (SRL) is scheduled for launch in December of 1993 on the first of its two missions. The SRL has three major radar instruments: two distributed phased-array antennas, which make up the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C System (SIR-C) and are capable of being electronically steered, and one X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (X-SAR), which is pointed mechanically by a suite of mechanisms. This paper will describe these mechanisms and summarize the development difficulties that were encountered in bringing them from the design stage through prototype development and protoflight testing.