[Paper Kosmonaut]

Hi. Storytime!

When in the early 1960s Europe too wanted to get a foothold in outer space, ELDO and ESRO were founded. A lot of European countries were involved, including the Netherlands. But although they financed the endeavour along with the rest, the Dutch were practically ignored when it came to active participation. The assignments for rockets and satellites always went to Germany, Italy and France.
The Dutch lacked experience, they said. Something they of course would never get when they couldn’t participate. So the Dutch delegation took a deep sigh and said to themselves: “Well, we’ll do it our bloody selves, then” (but of course they said it in Dutch, probably somewhere in the line of “Dan doen we het verdikke zelf wel!”).
They wanted their satellite to serve a scientific purpose, so it was decided it would be an astronomical satellite.

Skip forward a half a dozen years or so. With a big grant from the government the Dutch finally could start building in 1969. They named her ANS, which is an old-fashioned Dutch girl’s name but in fact stood for Astronomische Nederlandse Satelliet.
Two very special telescope systems would scan the Infrared and X-ray spectrum. The universities of Groningen and Utrecht would provide the telescopes and other astronomical instruments, the Philips company would create and build the brain and electronics, and Fokker would build it all together in a small frame, all under the supervision of the NLR, the Dutch Aeronautical institute.

NASA agreed to launch ANS for free if they could add their own little X-ray experiment in the satellite’s frame. Of course, the Dutch engineers already had left a space open for just that purpose. ANS weighted about 130 kilogram and was just over a meter in height. The satellite would be small enough to be launched on top of a Scout rocket. A modest choice.

The satellite, however small, wasn’t modest at all. In 1974, when ANS was launched, it was the first 100% digital spacecraft. NASA was deeply impressed by this little Dutch miracle. Everything on board was made especially for this purpose. No off-the-shelf components were used. Philips designed a truly unique feature with the solid-state on-board computer. It had a reprogrammable ferrite core memory of a whopping 28K. (we’re talking 1974 here!) This computer managed the whole spacecraft and could receive new assignments during the mission. Old ones could be erased. That was never been done before. NASA was also a bit worried because of the unproven system and also becasue of the amount of single-point failures in the satellite. There were no redundant or backup systems. None.


(There’s much more that was innovating and special about ANS, but I’ll keep it short. ish. (-; 

And so, ANS was launched, the 30th of August, 1974. Thanks to a faulty fourth stage of the Scout launcher, ANS came into an highly erroneous elliptical orbit which took it right through the Van Allen Belt. The on-board computer was given a new set of codes to operate on, so the instruments wouldn’t give faulty data as the satellite flew through the radioactive region. And despite the wrong orbit, ANS still worked like a charm. 
It started scanning the universe with an unprecedented precision. It helped to create a much more detailed image of the universe, because of the preciseness of the telescopes. ANS also discovered very interesting new things happening in pulsating X-ray stars and globular clusters.

As planned, ANS fell back into the atmosphere in 1977. 
After that, the Dutch never ever made another satellite on their own. 

Their next effort, called IRAS, was from the start intended to be a cooperation with the US and the UK. Nowadays, there are Dutch components in almost, if not, all ESA satellites. And outside the circle of Dutch astronomers, ANS seems to be just a footnote in Dutch space history and nearly forgotten.


Pictures: 1: ANS being tested at Philips, 2: The back-up flight article which nowadays is displayed in the Aviodrome and 3: the original thermic test article of ANS which was, at the time of the photo, a bit miserably fading away in a storage room of the Groningen University Museum.