Return-path: X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 7997;andrew.cmu.edu;Ted Anderson Received: from beak.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 ; Mon, 2 Oct 89 05:25:08 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU Date: Mon, 2 Oct 89 05:24:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: SPACE Digest V10 #100 SPACE Digest Volume 10 : Issue 100 Today's Topics: NASA Headline News for 09/26/89 (Forwarded) Re: Plutonium in space (was Risk of NOT launching Galileo) Re: Risk of NOT launching Galileo Orbital Sciences stock More about NASA Spaceflight Handbooks Re: Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized??? Re: Pluto meets Neptune Re: First group of prospective astronau Re: First group of prospective astronau ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 26 Sep 89 19:55:07 GMT From: ames.arc.nasa.gov!yee@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Peter E. Yee) Subject: NASA Headline News for 09/26/89 (Forwarded) ----------------------------------------------------------------- NASA Headline News Tuesday, September 26, 1989 Audio:202/755-1788 ----------------------------------------------------------------- This is NASA Headline News for Tuesday, September 26..... Tom Utzman, Kennedy Space Center's Deputy Director, says it's too early to assess the full extent of damage to the Space Shuttle Columbia after the fire sprinkler system was accidentally turned on in the Orbiter Processing Facility Sunday. Utzman told United Press yesterday that water did get into some parts of the orbiter, but it's "too soon to give up on plans" to launch the Columbia on schedule December 18. The launch date for the Atlantis remains on schedule for October 12 at 1:29 P.M., Eastern time. An official launch date will be set at the conclusion of the flight readiness review scheduled for October 2 and 3 at Kennedy Space Center. The Washington Post says the development of the Space Station Freedom..."has become a case study...in the difficulties the government faces in making a plan and carrying it out in the era of a deficit economy". In light of this, NASA managers have been given a variety of options in an effort to cut the cost of space station construction by $1 billion over the next five years, according to the post. The story also quotes a congressional source as saying, "we seem to have lost our ability to put something on paper and make it happen". Meanwhile, NASA Administrator Truly will testify on Capitol Hill this afternoon. The subject...building of a moon base and an eventual manned mission to Mars after the turn of the century. The apogee kick motor aboard the FltSatCom launched early Monday is scheduled to be fired later today to circularize the spacecraft orbit. The launch was the final NASA managed Atlas-Centaur flight. It was also the last of the present series of FltSatComs. Virginia environmental officials will ask a circuit court judge in Richmond tomorrow to close down the Avtex Fibers plant in Front Royal, Virginia. The plant, which is the sole producer of high quality rayon yarn used in NASA and DoD solid rockets, is accused of allowing toxic chemicals from the plant to flow into the Shenandoah River. * * * ----------------------------------------------------------------- Here's the broadcast schedule for public affairs events on NASA Select TV. All times are Eastern. Thursday, September 28.... 11:30 A.M. NASA Update will be transmitted. 1:00 P.M. Galileo mission probe briefing from the Ames Research Center. 3:30 P.M. Coverage begins of Amroc launch of Air Force/MIT experiments from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Launch window opens at 4:30 P.M. Friday, September 29..... 7:00 P.M. Premiere of the musical composition "Return to Flight" by members of the Brevard, Florida, Symphony at KSC's Spaceport USA. All events and times are subject to change without notice. ----------------------------------------------------------------- These reports are filed daily, Monday through Friday, at 12 noon, Eastern time. ----------------------------------------------------------------- A service of the Internal Communications Branch (LPC), NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. ------------------------------ Date: 26 Sep 89 22:49:21 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Plutonium in space (was Risk of NOT launching Galileo) In article <20133@usc.edu> robiner@ganelon.usc.edu (Steve) writes: >... little known fact is that the military sat >whch was on challenger was nuclear powered. Uh, if you're talking about the bird that was in Challenger's payload bay on January 28 1986, somebody has misinformed you. It wasn't nuclear powered and it wasn't military. It was the second Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, an entirely unclassified solar-array-powered NASA comsat. -- "Where is D.D. Harriman now, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology when we really *need* him?" | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 26 Sep 89 19:14:57 GMT From: bfmny0!tneff@uunet.uu.net (Tom Neff) Subject: Re: Risk of NOT launching Galileo It's a nice point that scratching Galileo could cost us weather knowledge, but Mission To Earth will do it better. -- "Take off your engineering hat | "The filter has | Tom Neff and put on your management hat." | discreting sources." | tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET ------------------------------ Date: 26 Sep 89 15:21:04 GMT From: skipper!shafer@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Mary Shafer) Subject: Orbital Sciences stock I have heard a rumor that Orbital Sciences is going to take its stock public. You may wish to speak with a broker and subscribe to this initial offering. Here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is! :-) Needless to say, I have absolutely no financial interest in Orbital Sciences, never have, and never will (unless I leave government service). I don't have any financial interest in any aerospace company, for that matter, because of the conflict of interest laws. Which are a Good Thing in my opinion. -- Mary Shafer shafer@elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov ames!elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov!shafer NASA Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility, Edwards, CA Of course I don't speak for NASA ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 26 Sep 89 10:38 CDT From: Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey Subject: More about NASA Spaceflight Handbooks Original_To: SPACE I asked Barry Pederson for more information on the NASA Spaceflight Handbooks, and he replied. Since he is having some trouble posting to Space Digest, he asked me to pass this along: =================================================================== Bill: ...As I said in the posting, I found the books in our university library (University of North Dakota, Chester Fritz Library, Grand Forks N.D. 58203) The library is some kind of federal document depository, I'm sure there must be something like it near where you live. The collection is divided by which agency each document comes from, so all the NASA publications are together. One person wrote to me asking what the SP numbers on the books were, I guess they might be the numbers used to order the books. The numbers are: Orbital Flight Handbook parts 1, 2, and 3 SP-33 Lunar Flight Handbook parts 1, 2, and 3 SP-34 Planetary Flight Handbook (9 parts) SP-35 I don't have the books with me as I'm typing this, but I'm pretty sure the publishing date for the first volume was 1963, the last was 1968 and the others were somewhere inbetween. As for authors, I think the first was the Martin-Marietta corporation and the last was Lockheed. I wish I could tell you how to get a copy yourself, but I don't know the procedure. You'll probably have to call around to your local libraries to find them, but if you need any specific information from the books such as serial numbers or whatever, let me know and I'll look it up for you. If you end up ordering copies for yourself from the Government Printing Office or wherever, I'd be interested in hearing where you order from and how much it cost... Barry Pederson ud092096@vm1.nodak.edu or ud092096@ndsuvm1.BITNET (I think vm1.nodak.edu works better) =============================================================== ______meson Bill Higgins _-~ ____________-~______neutrino Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory - - ~-_ / \ ~----- proton Bitnet: HIGGINS@FNALB.BITNET | | \ / SPAN/Hepnet/Physnet: 43011::HIGGINS - - ~ Internet: HIGGINS@FNALB.FNAL.GOV ------------------------------ Date: 26 Sep 89 17:44:46 GMT From: bfmny0!tneff@uunet.uu.net (Tom Neff) Subject: Re: Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized??? In article <2226@ibmpa.UUCP> szabonj@ibmpa.UUCP (Nick Szabo) writes: >>I think it's true that >>if we screw up the pristine surfaces of other planets with biological >>infections or massive "industrial" projects > >There has been a lot of loaded terminology thrown around this newsgroup >lately. The planets are Pristine, and human presence (or the presence of >any other kind of Earth life) is Contamination. I happen to think this is >100% backwards. Earth life (the only kind we know) is what we must work >on preserving. Thousands of species ares dyings every year in our rain >forests. Nuclear weapons threaten our own form of life, humans. And we're >worried about trillions-to-one odds (to be liberal) of "contaminating" Jupter >life with Earth life? Come on. 1. It is the above quoted poster who is loading the terms. Other planets' surfaces and atmospheres are indeed essentially "pristine" (not Pristine; here we ago again with the Creeping Capitalization Disease. Until Dr. Johnson is resurrected to post to the net -- a welcome development to be sure -- overcapitalization should be given a decent burial) with respect to "contamination" by Earth organisms, just as the Earth's surface is, we think, "pristine" from "contamination" by organisms from other planets. There is room for reasonable doubt on this last point when you consider the areo-meteorites, but that's not license to go hog wild ourselves in the other direction. 2. Concern for vanishing Earth species is orthogonal to concern for not trashing the Moon or Mars with grotesque strip-mines or pollution or giant Coca-Cola signs for that matter. The latter isn't going to help the former. We have to solve our problems down here regardless. The question is whether we create new problems elsewhere. >Do we really think planets are Pristine and Earth life is Contamination? >If so, we shouldn't be going into space at all. Logically, we should kill >ourselves now and let the Earth go back to its original Pristine state. No, it should be possible to go into space and do useful things without doing violence to other planets' possibly delicate systems. One of the quite nice things about asteroids and orbital projects is that you don't have to trash planets. Even the moon, which we'll go to eventually in force, I'm sure, offers a nice lack of systems to interfere with; it would just be nice if park bench lovers centuries hence don't have to look up at something resembling an aerial view of Slag Dump Five, Penna. [ remaining digressions into Christic(!) deleted ] -- Knowing *when* to optimize is just >>>/ Tom Neff as important as knowing *how*. /<<< tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET ------------------------------ Date: 26 Sep 89 18:26:30 GMT From: opus!ted@lanl.gov (Ted Dunning) Subject: Re: Pluto meets Neptune In article <2037@hudson.acc.virginia.edu> gsh7w@astsun3.acc.Virginia.EDU (Greg Scott Hennessy) writes: In article <5437@hplabsb.HP.COM> dsmith@hplabsb.UUCP (David Smith) writes: #The simulations (which someone reported on in this forum recently) show #that the orbits Neptune and Pluto are resonant, so that they will never #come close. While other similations show the orbit of Pluto to be chaotic, meaning that we can't predict how close they do come. actually if it actually _is_ chaotic, then we _can_ predict how close they will come. a chaotic system exhibits sensitive dependence, periodic trajectories, as well as dense trajectories. dense trajectories are such that their limit set is the entire domain. a chaotic trajectory is considered to be one of the dense trajectories in chaotic system. if pluto's orbit is chaotic, then it will pass arbitrarily close to any point in the domain, and thus the least upper bound on the distance between neptune and pluto is the smallest separation between the strange attractors that characterize their orbits. this is zero if the attractors intersect. what we can't determine is the future position of pluto (beyond certain computational and error limits), or the time at which pluto will be at a certain point (assuming that the orbit really is a chaotic system). of course the problem of determining whether a particular system is chaotic or not based on empirical observations is impossible, even in theory -- ted@nmsu.edu remember, when extensions and subsets are outlawed, only outlaws will have extensions or subsets ------------------------------ Date: 27 Sep 89 01:49:56 GMT From: jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@rutgers.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: First group of prospective astronau In article <218100031@s.cs.uiuc.edu> noe@s.cs.uiuc.edu writes: >...5 NASA employees, 11 armed forces, and 4 others. >The 4 others all hold doctorates. Although only 80% of those in the first >group work for NASA or the military, I'll lay odds that at least 90% of the >ones eventually selected to be astronaut candidates will come from this >category. The way to bet, I'd say, is that either none or one of the non-NASA/military candidates will be selected. And if one gets selected, it will be mostly a token "see, we don't *always* pick one of our own people" choice. NASA caught some flak from Congress for this a couple of years ago. There have been exactly two non-NASA/military astronauts picked in recent years, one of them a JPL consultant and son of an ex-NASA-bigwig, the other the first black female astronaut. NASA openly admits to a select-from-within bias. -- "Where is D.D. Harriman now, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology when we really *need* him?" | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 15 Sep 89 15:00:00 GMT From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!s.cs.uiuc.edu!noe@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu Subject: Re: First group of prospective astronau For those who are counting, that first group of potential astronaut candidates being interviewed comes out to 5 NASA employees, 11 armed forces, and 4 others. The 4 others all hold doctorates. Although only 80% of those in the first group work for NASA or the military, I'll lay odds that at least 90% of the ones eventually selected to be astronaut candidates will come from this category. ------------------------------ End of SPACE Digest V10 #100 *******************