USA-214

USA-214, also known as Advanced Extremely High Frequency-1 or AEHF-1, is a military communications satellite operated by the United States Air Force.

It is the first of six satellites to be launched as part of the Advanced Extremely High Frequency program, which will replace the earlier Milstar system.

The launch occurred at 11:07:00 UTC on 14 August 2010,[5] and resulted in the satellite being deployed successfully into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) with a perigee of 221 km (137 mi), an apogee of 50,179 km (31,180 mi), and 22.2° Orbital inclination.

[7][11] To solve the problem, the perigee altitude was raised to 4,700 km (2,900 mi) using twelve firings of the smaller Reaction Engine Assembly thrusters, originally intended for attitude control during LAE maneuvers.

[12] From this altitude, the solar arrays were deployed and the orbit was raised toward the operational orbit over the course of nine months using the 0.27 Newton Hall effect thruster, a form of electric propulsion which is highly efficient, but produces very low thrust and is therefore very slow.

AEHF-1 was launched on an Atlas V .