henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (06/05/90)
[This will be a real quickie, as I'm preparing to be away for two weeks and time is short.] Mamoru Mohri is Japan's first government astronaut, selected as payload specialist for the Japanese Spacelab mission next year. [AW&ST had it as "Japan's first astronaut", apparently forgetting the two journalists in training for the commercial Mir flight late this year.] NASA's aging spare TDRS, TDRS-1, is being moved west to supplement TDRS-3, which is operating at reduced capacity due to a partial antenna failure. TDRS-5, set for launch next year, will probably replace one of those two. [TDRS-2 was aboard Challenger; TDRS-4 is in the eastern position.] Hughes reports that poor facilities were a serious problem when preparing Asiasat 1 for launch at Xichang. For example, Hughes ended up putting in a satellite link to California to bypass China's hopeless international phone system. Sen. Al Gore, who supports the Moon/Mars initiative but wants to see more international participation and more concrete funding plans, says that at $500G, "Before a mission on Mars, I think the Administration needs a mission to reality.". Bush meets with Congressional leaders to try to rally support for expanded spaceflight activities, notably in the financial area. Various novel ideas for financing were broached, as was the notion of revising appropriations- committee structures so NASA would not constantly be competing head-on with the Veterans and Housing&Urban Development at appropriations time. No big results to report, but such meetings haven't been common in the past. Administration proposes 23% boost in NASA's budget next fiscal year, and is resisting any cuts at all. Major article with pictures of HST deployment and a detailed account of the various post-deployment headaches. [Sorry, I just don't have time to summarize two pages of dense information.] HST deployment mission set some other new records due to its record high altitude: most intensive OMS use, longest retrofire, hottest reentry, and (incidentally) first use of the new carbon brakes. Another long article talking about Sandia's ideas for using coilguns to launch small payloads into orbit. [Again, apologies for lack of time.] Technical problems remain, but the basic notion looks viable, partly because of recent improvements in high-power capacitor technology. A full-scale launcher, firing 61kg to low orbit per shot, would cost circa $1G but launch costs thereafter would be quite low. [It has the standard problem, of course: apart from the politically-handicapped SDIO, there are no firm customers.] -- As a user I'll take speed over| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology features any day. -A.Tanenbaum| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
news@haddock.ima.isc.com (overhead) (06/05/90)
In article <1990Jun5.041131.9222@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >[This will be a real quickie, as I'm preparing to be away for two weeks >and time is short.] >Major article with pictures of HST deployment and a detailed account of >the various post-deployment headaches. [Sorry, I just don't have time >to summarize two pages of dense information.] Let's see, May 7th... The first picture: an open star cluster, about 1,500 light years from Earth, NGC 3532. Focusing test delayed by a week due to various problems. The high gain antenna problem caused cascading problems for most of a week. A communications blackout for 3 hours... The telescope entered an "inertial safe mode", from which recovery was relativly quick. When controllers commanded Hubble's aperture door to open, two gyros went offline, causing it to enter "software safe mode", but with a reasonable attitude. 34 hours later, new data and commands were sent to Hubble to reconfigure it out of safe-mode. More high-gain antenna based delays. The low gain antenna was used to get engineering data from Hubble to deduce what was going on. Final photos of Hubble from Discovery showed the wire bowed slightly out of place near the #2 dish antenna. Tinkertoy technology & high tech graphics were used to model the problem. The high gain antennas were reconfigured. Checkout continued, but when checking the Pointing and Safe mode Electronics Assembly, they forgot to inhibit the aperture door. The door closed, causing motion, causing entry into safe mode again. About five hours later, they were able reopen the door. Henry does a great job at these AW&ST space news summaries. They are quite time consuming. I'd have missed the bit about Japanese Astronaut. No way I'd have remembered the Journalists... Stephen. suitti@ima.ima.isc.com