john@aplcomm.jhuapl.edu (John Hayes) (12/02/90)
This is John Hayes reporting from Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntville, Alabama. At 1:49 AM EST Sunday morning (12/2), Space Shuttle Columbia lifted the ASTRO observatory into orbit. The ASTRO observatory consists of three ultraviolet (UV) telescopes and an X-ray telescope. The UV telescopes are: HUT Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (from Johns Hopkins U.) UIT Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (from Goddard) WUPPE Wisconsin Ultraviolet Photopolarimeter Experiment (from U. of Wisconsin) The X-ray telescope is called: BBXRT Broadband X-ray Telescope (from Goddard) What does this have to do with Forth? All three UV telescopes are programmed in Forth (I don't know about BBXRT). The decision to use Forth was made completely independently by the three different institutions. I think this is good press for Forth. My personal involvement with the project has been programming the flight software for HUT. A coworker, Ben Ballard, and I spent two years writing the code for one of the computers in the telescope. Susan Schneider wrote the software for the other computer in the telescope. The two computers in HUT are 16 bit Forth machines. They are built with bit-slice components (AMD 2903) and have a microcoded Forth instruction set. These machines were designed in the early '80s and were working by the spring of 1982. The architecture was described in the Forth hardware issue of The Journal of Forth Application and Research, in Volume 3, I believe. HUT and ASTRO were originally scheduled to fly in March, 1986 (right after Challenger). Subsequent launch dates have been May 29, 1990, September 1, September 6, and September 18. John R. Hayes john@aplcomm.jhuapl.edu Applied Physics Laboratory Johns Hopkins University