Astro-D will weigh 420 kg and be launched on February 6th, 1993, from
Kagoshima Space Center by the ISAS launch vehicle, the M-3S-II
rocket, into an approximately circular orbit of inclination 31.5
degrees at an altitude varying between 500-600 km. It will be
three-axis stabilized to an accuracy of an arcminute, though the post
facto attitude reconstruction will be accurate to about 0.1 arcminute.
The mirror axis is parallel to the plane of the solar paddles, which
means that the observable region of the Sky is a belt
degrees wide along a great circle normal to the Sun vector. Direct
contact between the satellite and the ground stations will be possible
for ten of the fifteen orbits per day: five from Japan and five from
Australia. Although the designed life time is one year, the mission is
expected to last about five years, to generate 200 Mbytes of raw data
per day, and may observe up to seven sources per day. The eventual
mission archive will contain up to 300 Gbytes of raw data.