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/usr11/tm2b/space/space.dl@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr11/tm2b/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests) ID ; Thu, 13 Dec 1990 01:25:31 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <0bNluse00VcJIP2E49@andrew.cmu.edu> Precedence: junk Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU Date: Thu, 13 Dec 1990 01:24:57 -0500 (EST) Subject: SPACE Digest V12 #644 SPACE Digest Volume 12 : Issue 644 Today's Topics: Re: Sending Sen. Garn into space Re: Fluorine/ammonia engines space news from Oct 22 AW&ST Re: Thanks from "star gazer...maybe"..Bob and 8 year old Astro-1 Status for 12/06/90 [0815 CST] (Forwarded) Re: Another Russian first Astro-1 Status for 12/05/90 [2215 CST] (Forwarded) ASTRO status at 4/16:00 MET 10th planet? Re: Sending Sen. Garn into space Administrivia: Submissions to the SPACE Digest/sci.space should be mailed to space+@andrew.cmu.edu. Other mail, esp. [un]subscription notices, should be sent to space-request+@andrew.cmu.edu, or, if urgent, to tm2b+@andrew.cmu.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 6 Dec 90 06:01:42 GMT From: sdd.hp.com!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@ucsd.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Sending Sen. Garn into space In article <1990Dec5.104129.26129@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> gabriele@riverdale.toronto.edu (Mark Gabriele ) writes: >... So, Senator Garn "studied" the effects of motion >sickness in a low-g environment. Rumor has it that he was well suited >for the task. Thus, the name "Barfin' Jake". In fact, rumor hath it that the unit of spacesickness is the Garn, normally on a scale of 0 to 10. Garn came in at 12. -- "The average pointer, statistically, |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry ------------------------------ Date: 6 Dec 90 06:05:54 GMT From: swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@ucsd.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Fluorine/ammonia engines In article <27617@cs.yale.edu> yarvin-norman@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin) writes: >>Answer 2: Hydrogen and fluorine - better but still wrong > >Can this really be used near populated areas? I'd imagine it'd make some >pretty noxious acid rain... Unless you're launching Saturn-sized vehicles, the amounts are tiny compared to other man-made garbage. There are severe hazards in the immediate vicinity of the launch site, however, which is one major reason why NASA decided to pursue hydrogen/oxygen rather than fluorine. -- "The average pointer, statistically, |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry ------------------------------ Date: 6 Dec 90 05:53:01 GMT From: swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@ucsd.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: space news from Oct 22 AW&ST Tests of the shuttle drag chute, using the NASA B-52, underway at Edwards. Taiwan abandons plans to build its own satellite launcher, mostly because of US refusal to permit transfer of crucial technology (on the grounds, officially, that it could be used for missiles). Taiwan still plans to build its own satellites. Picture of the latest Ariane launch, carrying a pair of US commercial comsats. This is the fifth Ariane launch of the year, despite the hiatus after the February failure. Richard Malow, staff chief of the House subcommittee that handles NASA, warns NASA that the best it can expect is 8-10% annual budget growth over the next five years. That's better than most of the other agencies, but it is not enough for another orbiter, EOS, Fred, ALS, NASP, Moon/Mars, etc. NASA needs to bring its budget planning back into reality, he says. His comment on the space station: "The problem is the de-scoping has never matched the budget envelope". SDI gets deep cuts in the House/Senate budget compromise, plus partitioning of funds into five categories to limit SDIO's obsession with near-term Phase One deployment plans. Money for tactical missile defense, on the other hand, actually rose. Prediction is that the White House will accept this budget because of concessions elsewhere. H/S budget gives the USAF $600M for the Milstar strategic comsat, on the condition that the program shift firmly away from its preoccupation with strategic nuclear warfare. White House expresses willingness to make major changes to space station if the Augustine committee recommends them. Widespread feeling that major redesign is coming: the station is too costly, not useful enough, and too tied to the shuttle. There is some sentiment that it would be better to redesign for launch on a new heavy booster. White House has not yet decided whether to seek FY92 money for another shuttle orbiter (after Endeavour). Quayle announces that planning is underway to send a US astronaut on a Soyuz flight to Mir, and a Soviet cosmonaut on a US shuttle flight. No specific timetable yet. House/Senate conference trims NASA budget somewhat. Overall, NASA got a 13.6% increase -- most unusual -- but the space station was cut quite noticeably and Moon/Mars was zeroed completely. The station lifeboat was eliminated, as was the OMV. CRAF and Cassini were left alone. As predicted, Congress is decidedly angry about SDIO's proposal to slash long-term funding for projects like the free-electron laser in favor of more money for Brilliant Pebbles (which is now being touted as a key component of a system to defend against accidental or third-world attacks). Atlantis's secret military payload reported to be an imaging spysat with Gulf coverage as a high priority. Launch set for late evening Nov 10-11, a time that puts both transatlantic-abort sites in darkness [!]. Atlantis rolled out Oct 13, after being moved back to the VAB temporarily due to bad weather. A tanking test to check on hydrogen leaks is imminent. Columbia with Astro-1 moves to pad 39B Oct 15, after another crushed seal was found and tentatively blamed for the hydrogen leaks. A hydrogen tanking test has been set for Oct 29. Launch is hoped for before the end of December. [As everyone knows, this time something actually went well, and Columbia is up.] Pictures of Ulysses atop its IUS, outbound from Discovery's cargo bay. That taken care of, the crew ran some other experiments, notably a membrane-growth experiment for Battelle and monitoring of 16 lab rats being used in drug research by Genentech. The Battelle experiment was a striking success, with the resulting membranes of unusually high quality; Battelle's industrial partners are most interested. Details of the Genetech experiment are confidential, but the general idea is that exposing rats to free fall might be a useful way of evaluating drugs for use against bone and muscle deterioration. -- "The average pointer, statistically, |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry ------------------------------ Date: 6 Dec 90 14:08:43 GMT From: att!cbnews!ejk@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (erik.j.kramer) Subject: Re: Thanks from "star gazer...maybe"..Bob and 8 year old In article <2103@shodha.enet.dec.com>, b_egan@levers.enet.dec.com (Bob Egan) writes: > > > I want to thanks you all for responding to my earlier post. > ... > > Last week, I gave her a copy of the Saturn postscript picture taken > by the Hubble...she was impressed :) > Could someone please post (compressed would be fine) the postscript version of the Hubble shot of Saturn? I think a posting of representative sample here and there would be OK since a lot of us do not have access to FTP. Erik Kramer att!mvups!ejk ------------------------------ Date: 6 Dec 90 23:13:04 GMT From: trident.arc.nasa.gov!yee@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Peter E. Yee) Subject: Astro-1 Status for 12/06/90 [0815 CST] (Forwarded) Astro 1 Mission Report #25 08:15 a.m. CST, December 6, 1990 4/07:25 MET Spacelab Mission Operations Control Marshall Space Flight Center At approximately 6:15 a.m. CST, the second Data Display Unit on the aft flight deck of the orbiter unexpectedly powered off. Since the crew uses the DDU to command the Astro payload, their first response to the shutdown was to safe the instruments. Now flight controllers at Houston and mission management and science teams at Huntsville are studying possible work-arounds. Although no science data is presently being taken, "This has been an extremely good night for the Astro scientists!" reported Astro 1 Assistant Mission Manager Stu Clifton. "All targets have been acquired. Many of them with very long observing periods. And many of the targets recorded have been high priority targets for the scientists." Mission Scientist Gene Urban affirmed: "Tonight, we've been getting over 90% of the required time completed for a series of very successful observations." When Payload Specialist Ron Parise acquired Cygnus Loop B at approximately 12:15 a.m. CST he said: "This may be the most important observing of the mission." Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope Replanner Bill Blair certainly agreed with Parise's comment. "It was great! I have been waiting for this for 6 1/2 years. To see it (Cygnus Loop B) pop up on the screen, well, it was a feeling I can't describe. We got 31 minutes of data on it. It was a wonderful solid observation, the longest one we've gotten. And it happens to be one of my favorite targets." Blair has done work on the Cygnus Loop with the International Ultraviolet Explorer and is currently finishing up some work with the Voyager spacecraft that observed the supernova remnant at very low resolution. "To see the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope spectra with 10 times better resolution and all the other lines in the spectra is just wonderful!" The Cygnus Loop is a large object, three degrees across the sky. Tonight HUT looked at a shock wave being driven into an interstellar cloud on the edge of the supernova remnant. From the data acquired, the team will determine the density, the temperature and the chemical composition of the interstellar gas tha [Article damaged here. -PEY] of shock waves and eventually to a more complete picture of the universe. The Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope team was especially pleased with the science they were acquiring. Ralph Bohlin, co-investigator on the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, said "Tonight, we have crossed the threshold of getting routine observations 80 - 90% of the time, and this is the way we hope the rest of the mission goes. We are really quite happy." Co-investigator with the UIT team Andrew Smith spoke of the nature of one particular prime target that was a successful acquisition -- M-82 galaxy. "This extraordinarily active galaxy has been in collision with another galaxy called M-81, causing a lot of tidal influence between the two galaxies. This is producing a tremendous amount of star formation in the central part of this galaxy, which is blowing material out," said Smith. "We will be looking for star formation everywhere." UIT Astronomer Susan Neff noted that "the total amount of observing time for all previous ultraviolet imaging from rocket flights has been about 30 minutes, and tonight we've increased that by a factor of 10." Neff continued: "It is exciting that we got data on all our targets!" ------------------------------ Date: 6 Dec 90 10:21:49 GMT From: bfmny0!tneff@uunet.uu.net (Tom Neff) Subject: Re: Another Russian first In article <5616@testeng1.misemi> stanfiel@testeng1.UUCP () writes: >I believe there is plenty of evidence that Russian cosmonauts were >killed more than once, prior to Challenger, but the details have not >all been made public. Those pesky cosmonauts! You gotta drive a stake through their hearts or they won't stay dead! -- Don't be afraid to take a big step if it is \_ _/ Tom Neff indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two \_ _/ tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM small jumps. -- David Lloyd George \_/ uunet!bfmny0!tneff ------------------------------ Date: 6 Dec 90 23:10:46 GMT From: trident.arc.nasa.gov!yee@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Peter E. Yee) Subject: Astro-1 Status for 12/05/90 [2215 CST] (Forwarded) Astro 1 Mission Report #23 10:15 p.m. CST, December 5, 1990 3/21:27 MET Spacelab Mission Operations Control Marshall Space Flight Center "We're getting great spectral data," commented Principal Investigator Arthur Davidsen of the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope team, as he praised and congratulated the Astro-1 crew for successfully acquiring a targeted quasar. Davidsen's comments conveyed the growing feelings of excitement and delight of the many scientists and astronomers working from Spacelab Mission Operations Control in Huntsville, Alabama as the flow of science observations continues. The Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope gathered valuable ultraviolet data on the brightest quasar in the sky, 3C273. The HUT science team hopes to unlock the mysteries behind the enormous energy emitted by these objects by examining its spectrum. The Broad Band X-Ray Telescope is aligned with the Two-Axis Pointing System and is also currently collecting data. ------------------------------ Date: 6 Dec 90 23:06:45 GMT From: uvaarpa!murdoch!news@mcnc.org (Greg Hennessy) Subject: ASTRO status at 4/16:00 MET Well, the last 24 hours has brought good news, extremely bad news, and now decent news. The good news was that during shift nine, the first 11 objects observed averaged 76 percent of the scheduled observing time, a value that made the science teams VERY happy. Most of the tracking was done by the astronauts by joystick, and obtained lots of data for the spectrometers. The patch to the star tracker did not clear the problem, but the automatic tracking was tried only three time, suceeding once, the first time it did suceed. The stability was excellent, and there was hope that the star trackers could be made to work before very long. Even the manual guiding gave respectable images for the UIT, which is most affected by loss of the star trackers. Observations were done of M100, M74, Hercules X-1, the Cygnus Loop, Alpha Hydra, the Vela SuperNova Remnant, and M82, among others. Then disaster struck. The second Data Display Unit (DDU) failed. This left the astronauts with no way to enter commands to the instruments. This meant that the UV instruments could not take any data whatsoever, even though BBXRT was unaffected. The day was understandable hectic, but a contingency plan has been developed. All the UV instruments have a backup ground based controls. During the past shift these instrumetns were powered up and tested. During this time the shuttle gave priority to BBXRT telescopes. Starting with shift 11, the data for the telescopes will be entered on teh ground, and uploaded. The astronauts will still do the manual guiding, but otherwise the UV instruments will be controlled on the ground. The science observations for shift 11 were canceled, and a system was iinstutued to first try to get UIT working, then HUT, then WUPPE. This was in order of decreasing field of view, or of increasing difficulty. This scenerio was never simulated, since loss of both DDU's was thought to be an unreasonable scenerio. UIT will pick two targets on opposite sides of the sky, NGC 1399 at Ra 3 hours 36 min and Centaurus A at Ra 13 hours 22 min. UIT will "ping-pong" back and forth between these two targets for 4 orbits, then HUT will try 2 orbits trying to acquire the quasar Q1821, then WUPPE will try 2 orbits trying to acquire GAM-GEM. On shift 12 other targets will be tried, or increasing scientific interest and degree of difficulty. These targets are still being worked out. Once confidence is gained in this mode of observing, secondary observations will be allowed. It now appears that a 10'th day of the mission is possible. Boy, was today hectic. -- -Greg Hennessy, University of Virginia USPS Mail: Astronomy Department, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2475 USA Internet: gsh7w@virginia.edu UUCP: ...!uunet!virginia!gsh7w ------------------------------ Date: 5 Dec 90 13:30:08 GMT From: cs.utexas.edu!samsung!hubdub!yetmank@rutgers.edu Subject: 10th planet? I know this will sound stupid and uninformed, but I'm interested in opinions. Does anyone out there believe there are more than the 9 planets we know of now in our solar system. I had heard something many years ago about a 10th planet named Vulcan. Does anyone know of any hard evidence to back this up? Kevin UUCP%"yetmank%merrimack.edu@samsung.com" "You can still Rock in America" - Night Ranger ------------------------------ Date: 5 Dec 90 23:29:38 GMT From: att!linac!tellab5!balr!clrcom!rmartin@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Bob Martin) Subject: Re: Sending Sen. Garn into space In article <7042@ge-dab.ge.com> coleman@sunny.dab.ge.com (Richard Coleman) writes: >I don't think it was a bad idea. Hasn't Senator Garn been >a big supporter of the space program. If we could send every >senator up on the shuttle just once, I bet that the funding for >the space program would get a BIG boost. It depends upon how many of them we blew up in the process. No wait! Maybe we should REQUIRE all congressmen and reps to fly on the shuttle, then I think the space program would get lots and lots of extra money.... B-)> -- +-Robert C. Martin-----+:RRR:::CCC:M:::::M:| Nobody is responsible for | | rmartin@clear.com |:R::R:C::::M:M:M:M:| my words but me. I want | | uunet!clrcom!rmartin |:RRR::C::::M::M::M:| all the credit, and all | +----------------------+:R::R::CCC:M:::::M:| the blame. So there. | ------------------------------ End of SPACE Digest V12 #644 *******************