baalke@mars.jpl.nasa.gov (Ron Baalke) (01/19/90)
----------------------------------------------------------------- Tuesday, January 16, 1990 Audio: 202/755-1788 ----------------------------------------------------------------- This is NASA Headline News for Tuesday, January 16..... The space shuttle orbiter Columbia continues to perform well during its 10 day mission...and the crew is performing in a highly acceptable manner, too. Aside from a small water leak in a humidity separator and a false alarm from a navigational aid, columbia's systems are operating nominally. Mission specialists Bonnie Dunbar and David Low have been switching as subjects for daily lower body negative pressure checks with a new collapsible pressure check device. A number of other medical experiments are being conducted by the crew. Clear skies over parts of Africa this past weekend also gave the crew good opportunities to shoot pictures of Lake Chad, the Nile Valley and fires in Kenya as part of a photographic survey of the earth's surface. The weather report for landing at Edwards Air Force Base appears favorable for early Friday. Present plans call for landing on concrete Runway #22 at 5:59 A.M., Eastern Time. Early data from NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite supports the Big Bang theory. The information was revealed Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Crystal City, Virginia. The theory traces the origin of the universe to a primordial explosion some 15 billion years ago. The universe today shows that sometime after the Big Bang additional releases of energy must have occurred but COBE results limit the magnitude and character of such a release. Arianespace has rescheduled the launch of a Spot 2 earth resources satellite for January 20 from Kourou, French Guiana . A faulty tape recorder in the spacecraft has been replaced. The Ariane 40 booster has been checked out and found ready for launch. Ron Baalke | baalke@mars.jpl.nasa.gov Jet Propulsion Lab M/S 301-355 | baalke@jems.jpl.nasa.gov 4800 Oak Grove Dr. | Pasadena, CA 91109 |