KerbalX

Details

• Type: VAB
• Class: ship
• Part Count: 28
• Mods: 2
• KSP: 1.12.5

Mods

• Bluedog DB
• Squad (stock)

The idea of a satellite which could observe Earth’s weather from orbit started to take shape as early as 1946. The use of weather balloons to take atmospheric measurements had began in 1896 by Léon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort in which their use allowed him to identify the troposphere and stratosphere and other important details about the atmosphere. However weather balloons had considerably limitations until the late 1950s so with the advent of rocketry it was determined one of the uses for a rocket could be carrying cameras (and returning film) that could take photographs of cloud cover but it was prohibitively expensive in the early days of spacecraft and post-WWII rocketry development.

The TIROS (Television Infrared Observation Satellite) program was first initiated in 1958 with the goal of providing metrological photographs and other observations from space which had both military and civilian applications. The initial series of ten TIROS satellites were launched between 1960 and 1965 and were fairly successful in providing the first live footage from a satellite It would continued into other general weather satellite programs all the way to NOAA 19 in 2009.

The Nimbus program was initiated as a second-generation follow-up to the TIROS program with a larger and more advanced satellite. There would be seven of them successfully launched between 1964 and 1978 with each having more advanced systems including the use of the first RTG and GPS with Nimbus 3. The program drastically changed weather forecasting on a global scale and allowed for a multitude of observed factors to allow for finer and more accurate forecasts especially of dangerous weather such as hurricanes.

Nimbus 1 was obviously the simplest of the Nimbus program and like the rest was launched into a sun-synchronous near-polar orbit which allowed it to operate the same vast areas of the world under the same sun conditions. The satellite operated for almost a month before the solar panels could no longer charge the batteries but it would be a decade before the satellite re-entered the atmosphere.

The first Nimbus satellite was carried by a Thor DM-21 with an Agena B upper stage which had become a fairly successful launch vehicle by 1964. The Thor was a simple one-stage liquid fueled rocket while the Agena-B was the first operational production model of the Agena upper stage.

The Fenris is an approximation of the Thor rocket by Blue Dog Design Bureau and is a simple-to-use one-stage liquid fueled rocket. It should bring the payload into space after which the Belle-B upper stage takes over and also performs the orbital burn. The historical mission was to put the payload into a sun-synchronous orbit which is unfortunately impossible under stock settings. You can put it into a keo-synchronous orbit which would be an inclination of 0 degrees at an altitude of 2,863.33 km for something similar.

Built in the VAB in KSP version 1.12.5.