henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (12/14/90)
[A light news week, making up for last week.] Germany decides to abandon the Cargus expendable upper stage for Saenger, in favor of a cargo variant of the Horus reusable upper stage. NOAA and Eosat decide that Landsat images more than two years old will be available for reproduction cost. Bush signs legislation extending US patent law to spacecraft under US jurisdiction. White House says this is the final step in implementing the space-station cooperation agreement. OHB-System GmBH reports excellent results from its first Falke mission, dropping a shuttle-like lifting body from a balloon at 40km to collect aerodynamic data for Hermes. This drop was primarily to validate the drop system, but results were sufficiently good that the number of "real" drops next year will be reduced from two to one. Wups... Before the Nov 20 Ariane launch, technicians working on one of the two GE satellites discovered that the nutation damper was the wrong type, one meant for a Delta rather than an Ariane. To avoid having to replace the hardware at the last minute, GE had Arianespace deploy that bird at a higher spin rate than usual. Military weather-satellite photographs of the Gulf at night, both with and without moonlight. Nothing remarkable, as the resolution is about 3km except for bright lights. However, "although the desert area northwest of Riyadh looks barren in the moonlit image, note the large number of lights visible in this isolated region in the dark night image"! Atlantis diverts to KSC landing after high crosswinds at Edwards persist. This is the first KSC landing since April 1985, when Discovery blew a tire and damaged its brakes landing there. Edwards is the preferred site because of more predictable weather plus more and longer runways. Lenoir says that despite the time advantages of landing at KSC, more data on brakes and piloting issues will be needed before scheduling routine landings at KSC, and this will not happen for another 18 months at least. It remains the alternate landing site, however. Columbia/Astro launch set for Dec 2, allowing a 10-day mission and return from Edwards to KSC without support crews working over the holidays. -- "The average pointer, statistically, |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry