Return-path: X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 7997;andrew.cmu.edu;Ted Anderson Received: from corsica.andrew.cmu.edu via trymail for +dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests) ID ; Wed, 23 Aug 89 05:18:14 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU Date: Wed, 23 Aug 89 05:18:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: SPACE Digest V9 #616 SPACE Digest Volume 9 : Issue 616 Today's Topics: signature wars! :-) Re: What is the Solar Impact Mission? shuttle vs. heavy boosters Re: Public Interest in Space going to Pluto Re: exploding Saturns, lack thereof Re: Satellites Re: space news from June 19 AW&ST, and Apollo-anniversary editorial Face on Mars Re: Satellites ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 5 Aug 89 04:01:33 GMT From: jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@rutgers.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: signature wars! :-) In article <14517@bfmny0.UUCP> tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes: >"We walked on the moon -- (( Tom Neff > you be polite" )) tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET Say what? Your fathers walked on the Moon. *You* haven't, and can't. "When we dropped it, it broke." -- 1961-1969: 8 years of Apollo. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1969-1989: 20 years of nothing.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 4 Aug 89 08:36:37 GMT From: sgi!shinobu!odin!sgi.com!scotth@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Scott Henry) Subject: Re: What is the Solar Impact Mission? On 4 Aug 89 02:45:51 GMT, henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) said: hs> In article <24.Jul.89.09:32:31.BST.ZZASSGL@UK.AC.MCC.CMS> ZZASSGL@cms.manchester-computing-centre.ac.UK writes: >OK, What is the "Solar Impact Mission" and why is it so hard to >hit the Sun? After all we have already had close ups of Mercury. hs> I don't particularly remember hearing about this one, but almost certainly hs> it's a mission to go straight down into the Sun, doing some observations on hs> the way. The hard part is that to do it, you have to kill *all* Earth's hs> orbital velocity, which is about 50 km/s. A Saturn V could have dropped a hs> couple of hundred kg into the Sun, as I recall. The shuttle, forget it, hs> unless you use in-orbit assembly. A beefed-up Energia with about four hs> upper stages could probably put a modest probe into the Sun. Advanced hs> propulsion technologies would really help. I remember reading about this type of mission in an astrodymanics book: You use a Jupiter gravity (un)assist: you go "backwards" around Jupiter to kill your solar-orbital velocity. You can even get the spacecraft into a substantially retrograde solar orbit by trading off travel time to Jupiter (longer travel time -> more retrograde), and a smaller miss parameter at Jupiter encounter. If the spacecraft is intended to function close to the solar surface, the radiation environment at Jupiter should be mild by comparison... -- Scott Henry #include ------------------------------ Date: 5 Aug 89 03:46:09 GMT From: jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@rutgers.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: shuttle vs. heavy boosters In article <700@larry.sal.wisc.edu> jwp@larry.sal.wisc.edu.UUCP (Jeffrey W Percival) writes: >>>Welcome to the joys of "manned presence in space." >>Name an unmanned system, except Energia, that could do better for a payload >>that big. > >Ah, but maybe without the emphasis on manned shuttles, we could have >named such a thing. Really? How would that have come about? I can't see it. The only reason the Shuttle is as *big* as it is was the USAF involvement, and the USAF wouldn't have gotten involved if it had promised to be just another expendable -- the USAF already had its own expendables, remember, and was very reluctant to give them up for a NASA-controlled system. (In the end, it managed to keep them anyway, after fouling up the shuttle design fairly seriously first.) I would welcome an explanation of how a heavylift booster would have come about in the absence of the shuttle. I can't see any way myself. The Saturn V, the obvious choice, was shelved because Congress wouldn't fund any further production or use of it. (There was no shortage of ideas for missions to use it, both in a general sense and in the specific sense of Saturn Vs numbers AS-514 and AS-515 -- the last two heavylift boosters the US built -- which now have pigeons nesting in their engines.) -- 1961-1969: 8 years of Apollo. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1969-1989: 20 years of nothing.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 4 Aug 89 19:39:20 GMT From: visdc!jiii@uunet.uu.net (John E Van Deusen III) Subject: Re: Public Interest in Space In article <1989Jul30.194038.2343@cs.rochester.edu> yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) writes: > > ... If the average American has no enthusiasm for space at all, how > can you explain all of the mass media Apollo 11 Anniversary Specials? > The media doesn't do such things unless they expect a lot of people to > watch. I believe that the media *thought* that they could some how exploit the fact that we went to the moon twenty years ago and then didn't do anything nearly that ambitious again. The probable logic was that people under thirty might "be amazed". Well, the networks have been wrong before, and they will be wrong again. The real problem is that the media producers are for the most part under thirty themselves, and they didn't have access to an important piece of information that many of us "oldsters" recall. To quote Norman Mailer, "They [NASA] actually succeeded in making going to the moon boring". Even with color footage substituted from a later mission, it took barely ten seconds of watching for it all to come back to me: "Space ship sitting on the moon; dead silence; nothing; crackle; nothing; Uh, Roger; nothing; ..." -- *click*. > I think the real problem is that the emotions which space exploration > stimulates (wonder, excitement, and exhilaration) are not considered > valid emotions for adult behavior in general and public policy in > particular. The socially acceptable emotional motivations for public > policy are primarily fear (of the Soviets, nuclear war, the greenhouse > effect, the budget deficit, the trade deficit, and crime), guilt > (about the homeless, the poor, and the third world), and > self-righteousness (in regard to money, sex, illegal drugs, insider > trading, political ethics, and flag burning). It is clear from this that manned space exploration buffs are Walter Mittyish escapists. Catch the tail of that comet. Once we begin to mine the asteroids, all our problems will melt away. The hard fact is that manned space exploration is dangerous, stupid, and obscenely expensive. The harder fact is that we have already blown all our money. When the President says, "We're going to the moon to establish a permanent presence, and we are following this by a manned mission to Mars, and now Dan Quayle will explain how we are going to pay for it.", the man is clearly trying to let you down easy. Let us consider just one manned space project, the space station. Keep in mind that the current defense budget for protecting the US, Europe, and Japan from the world's economic basket case, Russia, is 305 billion dollars. Add to that the 50 billion needed, just this year, to insure the continued existence of ailing S&Ls, most of which are located in the President's home state. Given those problems, one might wonder why we would be building a space station? Our government must really be committed to advancing the frontiers, right? Actually the space station is a last-ditch effort to stave off a major depression in the military- industrial complex. It is the only way that the elected officials of the affected states, such as California, will allow the administration to even consider further arms reduction treaties. You can't get 305 billion dollars a year from the American tax payers to counter the threat posed by few-dozen, sun-crazed mullahs. Regardless of the motivation for building the space station, will it be built? I think not. It is now projected that there is a 78% chance that one of the space shuttle turkeys will blow up before the project is completed. There are people screaming in congress right now that we have to build another shuttle, in addition to the replacement for Challenger (for which school children sent in their lunch money), because the project can't be completed with only three shuttles. Well I'm sorry, but when the next shuttle blows up, that will be it for manned space exploration. The partially-finished, derelict hulk will just drift around and around. This fact is so obvious that I really doubt that anyone will actually put anything up. Especially since there is plenty of good money to be made just studying the thing to death. It once was said that America could make one of something, the Germans ten, the Japanese a thousand, and so on. The things we make in America are now so fantastically wonderful, take for instance SDI, that it is no longer necessary (or even possible) for us to make even one. The B2 may go down in history as the last fantastic, one-of-a-kind, horribly expensive, stupid thing that we ever made. A small consolation. -- John E Van Deusen III, PO Box 9283, Boise, ID 83707, (208) 343-1865 uunet!visdc!jiii ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 5 Aug 89 03:35 EST From: KROVETZ@cs.umass.EDU Subject: going to Pluto If we wanted to send a spacecraft to Pluto, what would be the earliest date we could reach it (given current technology)? I assume a fly-by of Jupiter would shorten the trip (with respect to a direct flight), but by how much? Would going via a third planet, perhaps prior to Jupiter, make the trip any shorter? Thanks, Bob krovetz@cs.umass.edu (internet) or krovetz@umass (bitnet) ------------------------------ Date: 4 Aug 89 15:50:52 GMT From: sco!hiramc@uunet.uu.net (Hiram Clawson) Subject: Re: exploding Saturns, lack thereof In article <1989Aug4.051836.22429@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >In article <2311@dciem.dciem.dnd.ca> bpd@dretor.dciem.dnd.ca (Brian P. Dickson) writes: .>In the motion picture _Koyaniskaaski_ (sp?), there is a five minute .>sequence at the end, where what appears to be a Saturn V is launched, .>and in one continuous shot, explodes, with the camera following one .>of the enormous engines for a very long time. Does anyone (Henry?) know .>which vehicle this was, and why it detonated? ... As Henry Spencer explained, there were no Saturn V's that exploded. I remember Koyannisquatsi (sp?), and what you are seeing is the spent first stage, just as Henry explains its appearance. --Hiram (uunet!sco!hiramc || hiramc@sco.COM) ------------------------------ Date: 4 Aug 89 15:44:26 GMT From: mcvax!ukc!axion!vision!simon@uunet.uu.net (Simon Taylor) Subject: Re: Satellites In article <1497@xn.LL.MIT.EDU> wjc@XN.LL.MIT.EDU (Bill Chiarchiaro) writes: > >[...stuff about watching satellites deleted....] >A good book on visual satellite spotting is "Observing Earth >Satellites" by Desmond King-Hele, Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1983, 184 >pp hardcover. You can order it from Sky Publishing (i.e. Sky & >Telescope), Cambridge, MA, 617-864-7360 for about $16.50. I called Sky Publishing today, they said this book was out of print, does anyone know of any other similar publications, and where I can get them. Thanks in advance Simon Taylor -- Simon Taylor UUCP : simon@vision.uucp VisionWare Ltd BANGNET : ...!uunet!mcvax!ukc!vision!simon Systime House PHONE : +44 532 529292 Ex. 2458 Leeds Business Park FAX : +44 532 526614 Leeds LS27 0JG TELEX : 556283 SYSTIM G England ------------------------------ Date: 5 Aug 89 20:24:38 GMT From: bfmny0!tneff@uunet.uu.net (Tom Neff) Subject: Re: space news from June 19 AW&ST, and Apollo-anniversary editorial It's hard to standardize on a platform when you wait decades between programs. The MM2 concentrates on propulsion and communications, I think, with no specific commitment to one kind of, say, camera or magnetometer, so it should be good for a while. At this rate it had better be... -- "We walked on the moon -- (( Tom Neff you be polite" )) tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET ------------------------------ Date: 4 Aug 89 23:04:00 GMT From: cica!ctrsol!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!indri!pikes!udenva!isis!scicom!paranet!mcorbin@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Michael Corbin) Subject: Face on Mars I am curious to know if anyone has any information about the Soviets finding an unusual anomaly on Phobos as recounted in an AP story. THE FOLLOWING NEWS ITEM APPEARED ON AP (ASSOCIATED PRESS) AT 4:41 PM EST MARCH 30, 1989: . "SOVIET RESEARCH CENTERS ARE NOW TRYING TO INTERPRET SO FAR 'UNEXPLAINED OPTICAL PHONOMENA' ON THE PICTURES OF THE MARTIAN SURFACE. THE PICTURES SHOW AN INIGMATIC STRIP 23-25 MILES WIDE AND A LARGE SPINDLE-SHAPED FORMATION." . According to NASA liason spokepersons in Moscow, the Soviets had not turned on their camera and WERE NOT even taking pictures of the Martian surface. This is the information which was relayed only a few weeks ago. AP also stated that the Soviet news program "Vremya" showed a detailed map of Mars "compiled from photos taken during the mission." It DOES now appear that the Soviets WERE taking pictures and furthermore, it looks like they may have found something in those photographs which is quite interesting. . ============================================================= Uploaded by Martin Arant on ParaNet Alpha (303)431-1343 Mike -- Michael Corbin - via FidoNet node 1:104/422 UUCP: ...!scicom!mcorbin INTERNET: mcorbin@paranet.FIDONET.ORG ------------------------------ Date: 4 Aug 89 22:49:00 GMT From: cica!ctrsol!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!indri!pikes!udenva!isis!scicom!paranet!mcorbin@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Michael Corbin) Subject: Re: Satellites > From: kendalla@pooter.WV.TEK.COM (Kendall Auel;685-2425;61- > 028;;pooter) > Date: 31 Jul 89 16:47:22 GMT > Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Wilsonville, OR > Message-ID: <4067@orca.WV.TEK.COM> > Newsgroups: sci.space > > In article <30.24D154EA@paranet.FIDONET.ORG> > mcorbin@paranet.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Corbin) writes: > >I am new to this newsgroup and am curious about something that I > >have seen in the night sky. > > > >I have noticed a variety of objects which appear to be the size > >of a medium star moving in different directions across the sky. > >Some of them are probably satellites, however there have been a > >few which pulse or flash very intensely at times and do not seem > >to be rythmic. Could anyone enlighten me on what these objects > >could be? > > > > I think it is unlikely that what you are seeing are > satellites. What you > are probably seeing instead are passenger jets passing by > at high altitudes. > You generally won't hear them, and the pulsing or flashing > can be caused > by a couple of things. First of all, some of the lights > are directional, > so that as the aircraft passes by, you will see varying > degrees of brightness. > Also, there are strobe lights on the tail and wings, I > believe, that flash > at a regular interval. I have clearly identified passenger jets as I use a pair of 10X50 binoculars and a 6" Celestron Telescope. What I am seeing is not these objects. > Here's my one and only UFO encounter: I was looking out to > the horizon one > evening and saw a star. So, I made a wish. Over about ten > minute's time, > I noticed that the star seemed to be getting brighter. I > went inside and > got my sister to come out a take a look at it. As we > watched, it did indeed > get brighter. It was completely stationary, because it was > just to one > side of a large tree and remained a constant distance from > it. We went > inside again and got the rest of the family to come out and > watch it. There > was a lot of conjecture about what it was. We talked about > super-novas and > satellites, and even UFO's. As we sat and watched and > talked (about another > 15 minutes), the object got brighter and brighter, and > stayed in its fixed > position. Suddenly, it started moving upward, slowly then > faster and faster. > At the same time it got very bright, almost hard to look > at. Then came > a thunderous scream as an F-4 phantom jet flew directly > over our heads at > low altitude. Wow! Very interesting report Kendall. Perhaps you should send me net mail at mcorbin@paranet.fidonet.org so we can discuss this further. Mike -- Michael Corbin - via FidoNet node 1:104/422 UUCP: ...!scicom!mcorbin INTERNET: mcorbin@paranet.FIDONET.ORG ------------------------------ End of SPACE Digest V9 #616 *******************