My World in 100 Objects: 7. ROSAT watches

I spent many watches on console during the Launch and Early Operations Phase (LEOP) of the Röntgen Satellit Mission.

These are two of my ROSAT watches (both sadly broken now). They made sure I turned up for my watch on time.

I loved the Dornier promotional watch. The silhouette of the satellite (redesigned for launch on an expendable launch vehicle after the space shuttle disaster) would go round and round with the seconds, making one orbit every 60 seconds. The original made one orbit every 90 minutes, until it re-entered and burned up some years back.

It was fascinating talking to Canberra, Goldstone and Madrid Deep Space Network ground-stations in the course of that 90 minutes knowing that the s/c was crossing oceans in mere minutes. Knowing that they were all speaking their own peculiar versions of English, the lingua franca of the space industry :)

And as an X-Ray observatory mission, the US HRI instrument imaging the Moon in solar X-rays for the first time and the UK WFC instrument conducting a wide-field survey of astronomical objects radiating in the ultra-violet, there was only one way to compose this image...