andrew@cadomin.UUCP (Andrew Folkins) (03/31/86)
The following is from the April issue of Sky & Telescope.
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Space Shuttle Lost
On January 28th at 11:38 a.m. Eastern time, the Space Shuttle
Challenger left its Florida launch pad for the 10th and last time.
Seventy-three seconds after liftoff the spacecraft exploded, killing
its crew of seven. This was the first fatal accident involving
Americans during an actual space flight (three Apollo astronauts were
killed during a prelaunch test in 1967). Also lost in the explosion
were a Spartan satellite, which was to observe Halley's comet at
ultraviolet wavelengths, and a large NASA communication satellite that
was to provide a crucial data link for the Hubble Space Telescopt (HST)
later this year.
The IAU Minor Planet Center announced in March that seven sequentially
numbered asteroids were named in honor of the astronauts who perished.
In order, the asteroids are 3350 Scobee, 3351 Smith, 3352 McAuliffe,
3353 Jarvis, 3354 McNair, 3355 Onizuka, and 3356 Resnik. All of them
were discovered by Edward Bowell and Norman Thomas at the Anderson Mesa
Station of Lowell Observatory in Arizona.
The tragic loss of Challenger put the American space program on hold at
a time crucial to several key scientific payloads. In early February,
the space agency cancelled the next three missions set to fly on the
shuttle. Astro-1 would have observed Halley's comet and other
celestial targets with a trio of telescopes during the second week of
March. NASA also postponed Galileo and Ulysses, separately launched
probes that were to head toward Jupiter in May. Another Jupiter launch
"window" for these two missions does not occur until June, 1987.
Moreover, Galileo has now lost the opportunity to fly past the large
asteroid Amphitrite this December. Finally, by March it seemed that
shuttle flights would not be resumed for a year, so the launch of HST
will probably be delayed past its scheduled October 27th date.
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--
Andrew Folkins ...ihnp4!alberta!andrew
"We humans think of ourselves as being rather good at reasoning, but at
best we perform about a hundred logical inferences a second. We're
talking about future expert systems that will be doing ten million
inferences a second. What will it be like to put a hundred years thought
in every decision? Knowledge is power." - Edward A. Feigenbaum