henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (03/06/90)
Editorial applauding the retrieval of LDEF, but observing that NASA had to choose between LDEF and Solar Max, and lamenting that the $20M LDEF cost far more than that to launch and retrieve and is unlikely to fly again. IBM subcontracts operating system for space station to Lynx Real-Time Systems Inc, a 30-employee company in California! NASA seeks $200M in FY91 for lunar/Mars technology work in seven areas: regenerative life support, aerobraking, orbital propulsion, lunar-base nuclear power, uses of lunar/Martian soil, radiation protection, and nuclear propulsion. Truly recommends to Space Council that "the first decade of the 21st century" be the target goal for a lunar base. [Call it 19 years. Apollo took 8. I'm not impressed.] NASP prime contractors submit a tentative agreement to join together in a consortium to pillage the taxpayers, er excuse me I mean build NASP, more efficiently. The FY90-91 DoD budget authorization act will designate NASP as a pure research vehicle, to do an end-run around antitrust laws. Rockwell is designated team leader, possibly partly because it has stuck most firmly to the original idea of maximizing use of air-breathing propulsion and minimize dependence on rockets. SDI's LACE satellite being prepared for launch on a Delta. The main payload is the Low-power Atmospheric Compensation Experiment, in which sensors scattered over booms and panels extending from the bird will measure distortion of a low-power laser beam aimed at the satellite from the surface. Auxiliary payloads include a pair of ultraviolet cameras to study UV tracking of rocket plumes, and an Army/Los Alamos experiment to measure neutron background in space. There may also be "a fourth, classified experiment... believed to be developmental hardware for detecting nuclear blasts", which is not from SDI. LDEF is on the ground again. The backup plan, for use if Syncom could not be deployed -- take LDEF on board, boost up to a higher orbit, and deploy it again pending a still later retrieval (!) -- was not needed. Landing was delayed a day by fog at Edwards, and delayed one more orbit by a failure in Columbia's #5 computer (#4 replaced it for the landing). The astronauts took their time coming out after landing, and are generally taking it easy, after the longest US spaceflight in fifteen years [a whole 11 days, sigh...]. LDEF will go back to KSC aboard the orbiter, partly because this will contaminate it less than separate shipping and partly because removing a payload that big would require moving quite a bit of equipment from KSC to Edwards temporarily. The 747 will make three stops rather than the usual one, because the unusually heavy load limits fuel load. Hubble launch slips a month as incomplete test data raises doubts about seals on Discovery's SRBs. They will be taken apart and re-stacked. Secret DoD launch of Atlantis slips six days, probably a payload problem. The bird is "AFP-731", with both digital imaging systems and eavesdropping receivers, and it will go into an unusually high-inclination orbit, 62 degrees. Only two more military payloads are on the shuttle manifest after this one, and the USAF asst. sec. for space says no more are planned, although the option will remain open. "We don't have anything that specifically requires the manned capability..." [Translation, everything requiring the manned capability was shelved because the USAF's expendables have no manned capability.] First Ariane launch of 1990 goes perfectly, carrying Spot 2, plus six amateur radio satellites on a new auxiliary-payload carrier platform. This launch, Jan 21, ends a hiatus in Ariane operations due mostly to payload problems. [Of course, there is now going to be another hiatus, since the *next* Ariane launch wasn't so smooth...] On reaching orbit, Spot 2 was deployed, the Ariane third stage turned 180 degrees and deployed UoSAT D and E, and then turned back 25 degrees to release Microsats A-D. The individual UoSAT/Microsats were deployed by springs of different strengths to ensure separation. The UoSAT/Microsat folks split the secondary-payload bill of about $170k (normally $600k, but this was the first flight of the new secondary-payload platform). Several pages of photos of LDEF in space. MBB is defining a subscale model of Sanger's hypersonic first stage, for use in validating design and propulsion. Letter from J.R. French [a well-known name in astronautics] criticizing AW&ST's "Laurels" award to the team that put together NASA's initial response to Bush's Moon/Mars initiative. "...simply a rehash of the sort of thing NASA has been promoting all along, namely taking 15 years to do what we once did in eight, starting with nothing... NASA spent the 90-day study justifying a pre-established position rather than doing any new thinking... `space station Freedom', recently downscaled because of budget problems, magically grows back to the old configuration for Moon-Mars. This is design to preconception -- not design to need..." [Something that wasn't in AW&ST at all, that I saw, but reached me by more obscure channels: NASA has placed an order with Rockwell for a set of shuttle structural spares, to replace the ones being used to build Endeavour. Apart from being useful in themselves, they preserve the option of ordering another orbiter in the next year or two.] [From Spaceflight, Jan issue:] Salyut 7 is out of fuel and tumbling, and the Soviets are studying how to deorbit it safely. Reentry will occur in 3-4 years as things stand. One possibility is to dock a Progress or Soyuz and use its engines to deorbit Salyut. Reports that Buran would be used to bring Salyut down for examination are described as "a kind of fantasy", presenting various problems with solar panels and structural support, that does not seem worthwhile at present. Salyut has been unmanned in a high parking orbit since 1986, although there were reports that astronauts would return to it eventually. ESA and UK agree to establish an Ariane telemetry station on Ascension Island. The mothballed shuttle pad at Vandenberg will be converted for Titan 4 launches. The USAF would have preferred to build a new Titan pad, but Congress balked at the price tag. [From Flight International, 31 Jan:] NASA places firm contract for launch of Mars Observer on Commercial Titan in Sept 1992. McDonnell Douglas starts development of the Aeroassist Flight Experiment on NASA contract. It will fly the first operational test of aerobraking. In May 1994 it will go up on Endeavour, fire a solid-fuel motor to drop its orbit into the atmosphere, fly an aerobraking pass, and then boost itself back up into orbit for recovery by Endeavour. Soviets plan a second-generation materials-processing satellite [the US having yet to build a first...], the Nika-T series, to fly first in 1993 aboard the Zenit booster. It will be heavier than the current Photon series, and will include solar panels to permit a 120-day mission (as compared to Photon's 16 days). The return capsule will have nearly triple the current 450kg capacity, although it will continue to be based on the Vostok capsule (which first flew as Sputnik 4 in 1960). [From the 26 Jan issue of Science:] Preliminary results from the Cosmic Background Explorer are in, and there is good news and bad news. The good news is that COBE has decisively shot down Berkeley/Nagoya sounding-rocket data which had suggested that the cosmic background might be warmer than a black body at some infrared wavelengths that cannot be seen from the grond. Such extra warmth would have required "the tooth fairy" to explain it. However, COBE reports that the cosmic background is essentially a perfect black body at a temperature of 2.735 K. The bad news is that the theorists have been hoping to see variations in the background from one part of the sky to another, which would reflect the early density variations that eventually turned into clusters of galaxies. Unfortunately, with preliminary results for 75% of the sky, COBE reports no variations whatsoever. If this persists over the full sky with more-accurate later results, the theorists are in trouble. (They are already having some other difficulties, but this would make it much worse.) [And from the 2 Feb issue of Science:] The standard explanation of meteorites is that they are debris from the asteroids. This is convenient in that it gives us samples of asteroidal material, albeit very poorly documented ones. The most common type of meteorites, the ordinary chondrites, are thought to be derived from the common type S asteroids. The material in ordinary chondrites seems to be primitive material from the early solar system, never exposed to major heating. Unfortunately, the spectroscopists have announced strong evidence that the type-S asteroids are too metal-rich to be primitive bodies in general, and to be the source of the ordinary chondrites in particular. Confusion reigns: where can the ordinary chondrites possibly be coming from? There is some hope that the first Galileo asteroid encounter, with Gaspra in Aug 1991, might shed some light on asteroidal geology: Gaspra is type S. -- MSDOS, abbrev: Maybe SomeDay | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology an Operating System. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu