henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (02/01/90)
In article <7786@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> rose@odin.ucsd.edu.UUCP (Dan Rose) writes: >Does anyone know some details about the LDEF experiments? In >particular, what I'm wondering is whether there were "active" >experiments in LDEF which might have been adversely affected >by being left up an extra five years. (Clearly this is no >problem for "passive" experiments, i.e. "let's see how well this >slab of ceramic holds up after years in space.") Everyone has >treated the extra few years of exposure as a bonus, but I can >imagine it invalidating a lot of work on certain experiments. A number of experiments were recording data on tape recorders (since LDEF had no transmitters) for later analysis. The data is still there, of course, but experiments that relied on correlating data with the state of specimens won't be in good shape -- most of them only had about a year's worth of tape (and a year's worth of battery power for the recorders), so the specimens have had four years to degrade without any matching data collection. Actually, even passive experiments will have suffered in some cases. Things like thin films that were expected to be somewhat degraded after 6-12 months may be gone entirely now, with no easy way to figure out just how quickly they eroded. -- 1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1990: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
wab@reed.UUCP (Bill Bennett) (02/05/90)
I was recently at the Air & Space Museum in Washington, and one of the Shuttle IMAX films they show (Not "Hail, Columbia") includes footage of the original deployment of LDEF. As they pop it out of the payload bay, one of the astronauts comments, "We'll be back in a year or so to get it." Or so, right. There were a few titters among the aficionados in the audience.