Date: Sat, 13 Mar 93 05:21:27 From: Space Digest maintainer Reply-To: Space-request@isu.isunet.edu Subject: Space Digest V16 #308 To: Space Digest Readers Precedence: bulk Space Digest Sat, 13 Mar 93 Volume 16 : Issue 308 Today's Topics: Alignment of planets? Clementine and the Moon (was Re: plans, and absence thereof) DC-X Goddard held responsible? Here's an example of an anonymous post (2 msgs) Joe Shea - NASA SSF (2 msgs) Kill or ignore: Just a Test - Sorry! Life in the Galaxy Light Pollution Information Sources McElwaine NASA and gold Retraining at NASA Solar Array vs. Power Tether SSF Drag SSI (Conestoga) adderss? Threat of mass cancellings was Re: Anonymity is NOT the issue (3 msgs) Winding trails from rocket (2 msgs) Welcome to the Space Digest!! Please send your messages to "space@isu.isunet.edu", and (un)subscription requests of the form "Subscribe Space " to one of these addresses: listserv@uga (BITNET), rice::boyle (SPAN/NSInet), utadnx::utspan::rice::boyle (THENET), or space-REQUEST@isu.isunet.edu (Internet). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 11 Mar 1993 10:06 EDT From: ERIC OVERTON Subject: Alignment of planets? Newsgroups: sci.space Will an alignment of the planets occur in the near future like in the year 2000? Will all the planets be in this alignment? Eric ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 21:10:51 GMT From: Martin Connors Subject: Clementine and the Moon (was Re: plans, and absence thereof) Newsgroups: sci.space In article <1993Mar11.101455.1@fnalf.fnal.gov> higgins@fnalf.fnal.gov (Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey) writes: > The major purpose of Clementine is to test SDI sensors in space. As > long as they need to fly a couple of UV-visible and IR cameras, and a > laser altimeter/LIDAR, they decided to do some lunar and asteroid > science with them. I heard about Clementine in detail at the 'Asteroid Hazard' meeting in Tucson in January. The SDI people were taken to task by a noted scientist for trying to stretch the limits of the anti-missile-missile treaty by not testing this sort of stuff in NEO where it would be directly forbidden, but sending the same equipment into Deep Space and testing it there. Any knowlegible people have a comment? Apart from the moral aspects Clementine sounds like a dream mission. Disclaimer: above may seem a bit evasive but direct quotes from what was said at the meeting are not appropriate in this context. -- Martin Connors | Space Research | martin@space.ualberta.ca (403) 492-2526 University of Alberta | ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 1993 22:51:22 GMT From: Andy Cohen Subject: DC-X Newsgroups: sci.space I had the incredible honor to get a detailed tour of the Delta Clipper-X... and I'd like to try sharing some of it with you all.... I went over there on my daily lunch time walk-by and saw a group of MDA folk getting a tour ..... so I ...walked over and joined them.... I got to hear the end of the description of how the hydraulic system on the engine gimbles work....We were then invited to climb the stairs to get a closer look at the upper sections...some of the buildings here are tall and made for working on titans and deltas..... The interior of the DC-X was exposed with the exterior-Dick Rutan-produced shell standing on it's German produced landing gear off to the side... I got a closeup view of the Oxygen tank which looked like it came from a titan booster or possibly a delta-large cylindrical and takes up at least 2/3 of the interior... The sperical hydrogen tanks are in a framework which sits on top of the O2 tank. The same framework has a platform over the H2 tanks which house the avionics...which are off the shelf from the F-15 program. I also got to see the hydraulics for the side flaps.... Everything is literally OFF-THE-SHELF....rivets, connectors...cables are longer than they needed to be just in case of a design change.....DC-X is a perfect example of concurrent engineering in the extreme! The outside shell is square on the bottom and narrows at the top to a circle. Each side has a large flap which is used like the stabilizer on a jet to control the DC.....along with the flaps, and the engine gimbeling, the tour guide told me that the engines are throttled at different rates to also control DC direction...the use of all three are supposed to be enough to.....turn it around for a landing....... The landing gear are not strong enough to hold a fully loaded DC-X...instead a launch frame holds the infrastructure and during flight at some point the foor "legs" extract then help absorb shock at landing...along with the engines...... We were standing at the opening of the building looking at the landing gear when.....Pete Conrad strolled by and went into a trailer.... I immediately realized that the trailer housed the launch control system..... After telling the tour guide of the support for DC-X coming from the people here at sci.space I asked if I could go into the control trailer.... It was great! a set of Silicon Graphics workstations all with highly interactive, graphical representations of the DC-X flight systems..all running a liftoff simulation and tied directly to the avionics on the real bird.....Pete's console had a display of an ADI-like presentation to give some idea of the reliationship of DC-X orientation with the Earth surface. There were graphical representations of the engines and the flaps too......it was a lot like what I and my team have been developing for SSF. The team in the trailer were happy to exchange technical details.... I told them that I'd trade my slot on SSF for a seat, but they all.....laughed! They were MOST interested in hearing about YOUR support. I agreed to carry hard copies of posts from here to their facility as a morale booster.....they say they work 40 hour days there....... and are looking forward to months in the desert.......They do not know about how this communitee feels about their efforts...so SPEAK UP!! I will be uploading for FTP more stuff....stay tuned!! Just 3 more weeks to the rollout!!! ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 93 18:41:20 GMT From: fred j mccall 575-3539 Subject: Goddard held responsible? Newsgroups: sci.space In 18084TM@msu.edu (Tom) writes: >automobile, responsible for untold numbers of marriges and conceptions, >as well as 350,000 deaths annually in the U.S., or... Isn't that figure just a tad high? -- "Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world." -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 19:46:01 GMT From: "John Q. Random" Subject: Here's an example of an anonymous post Newsgroups: news.admin.policy,news.admin.misc,sci.space,alt.privacy What does it take for people to realize that anyone can be anyone they choose? You don't have to use any damn anonymous service, you can say what the hell you want by just getting a random account like this one and posting away. Give me a break, people. Choose something else to get mad about... like inappropriate postings or cascades. This one you cannot do anything about. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 20:49:41 GMT From: "J. Q. Random" Subject: Here's an example of an anonymous post Newsgroups: sci.space In article <1993Mar12.194601.2411@jato.jpl.nasa.gov>, jqr@jato.jpl.nasa.gov (John Q. Random) wrote: > > What does it take for people to realize that anyone can be anyone they > choose? You don't have to use any damn anonymous service, you can say > what the hell you want by just getting a random account like this one > and posting away. > > Give me a break, people. Choose something else to get mad about... > like inappropriate postings or cascades. This one you cannot do anything > about. I don't appriciate you forging my name! The real J.Q. Random jqr@jpl.nasa.gov ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 93 19:21:22 GMT From: "Kieran A. Carroll" Subject: Joe Shea - NASA SSF Newsgroups: sci.space In article <1993Mar11.143736.7280@draper.com> mrf4276@egbsun11.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Matthew R. Feulner) writes: > >I meant to followup to the article which mentioned him, but I lost it. > >Anyway, he has been a prof here at MIT for a few years coming here >from Raytheon, I believe. He had a big part in the increased >reliability of the Patriot missle (reliability, as in it fires >when you want, not as in it hits when you want). He tought a >spacecraft design course which a few of my friends took, and said >was decent. I saw him give a number of talks, and he sounded >like a fellow with a great deal of common sense. I believe >NASA did themselves a world of good by getting him. > >Matt For those of you who ahven't read the book "Apollo: The Race to the Moon", Joe Shea worked for NASA between 1961 and about 1967. In 1961 he was hired to wring a decision out of NASA Marshall and (what would become) Johnson, regarding "how to get to the moon" (i.e. Earth-orbit rendezvous vs. Lunar-orbit rendezvous vs. direct-ascent). His big success there seems to have been to bring the Huntsville and Houston cultures together, allowing them to agree on the technical merits and drawbacks of the various modes. He then moved on to head the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. The book credits him with saving what was a sick program, through inspiring leadership and great technical competence. Both of these episodes certainly would make him seem to be a good man to handle a reorganization/ redesign of the Space Station program. -- Kieran A. Carroll @ U of Toronto Aerospace Institute uunet!attcan!utzoo!kcarroll kcarroll@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 22:06:56 GMT From: Dave Michelson Subject: Joe Shea - NASA SSF Newsgroups: sci.space In article kcarroll@zoo.toronto.edu (Kieran A. Carroll) writes: > >[Joseph Shea] then moved on to head the Apollo Spacecraft Program >Office. The book credits him with saving what was a >sick program, through inspiring leadership and great >technical competence. Both of these episodes certainly >would make him seem to be a good man to handle a reorganization/ >redesign of the Space Station program. I've always thought it was really sad that he and Harrison Storms (NAA) were chosen to take the big fall for the Apollo 1 fire. Anything I have read about these two men in the past several years seems to be summed up by the phrase "inspiring leadership and great technical competence". On the topic of SSF redesign, now would be a good time for those who are interested to reread "Living and Working in Space", the NASA History Series book on Skylab. Things haven't changed much in twenty-five years. Apart from all the problems with redesigns and budget cuts, the biggest problem for Skylab designers was finding experiments for the crews to perform. I had always thought that the supply exceed the demand, and, I suppose, in a sense it did. But there were relatively few experiments that took real advantage of the volume available in the workshop. And life sciences experiments, supposedly the major justification for Skylab, weren't looked at very closely until relatively late in the design phase of the program. --- Dave Michelson University of British Columbia davem@ee.ubc.ca Antenna Laboratory ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 93 10:32:01 GMT From: fedsoyu@krasinay.pleb.com Subject: Kill or ignore: Just a Test - Sorry! Newsgroups: sci.space TEST TE ST test ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 93 23:34:20 GMT From: Jeff Bytof Subject: Life in the Galaxy Newsgroups: sci.space Some Thoughts on Technological Life in the Galaxy ------------------------------------------------- I. If technological life were abundant in the galaxy (and I don't think it is) then we might have to face annihilation or assimilation with a fair degree of certainty, in my opinion. Not that they would travel here directly, but that when the "galactic conversation" got around to biology they (and we) might want to trade DNA sequences. Whatever the importance to our science of such an exchange, it might give them the knowledge to effectively introduce something nasty into our biosphere, and do it by either unwitting cooperation on our part or by swift dispatch of a small ampule to our Solar System and Earth. This is what I would call the "Galactic Jungle" model. II. On the other hand, I believe that technological life is very sparse in the Galaxy, and so favor the "Desert" model. A possible activity in such a model would be the placement in counter-revolving galactic orbits of a series of automated stations that would be designed to relay general astronomical information back to the home planet. Our Pioneers and Voyagers are early designs of this idea. The stations might be set up to generate their own power by passing wires through the galactic magnetic field and would have instrumentation designed to detect signals from civilizations like ours. I estimate as the most probable scenerio that any systematized transmission we receive from another technological civilization will be from an automated probe within 1000 light years. Thus we have quite a while to wait before such a station detects the earth. The placement of automated probes effectively increases N in the Drake equation, and perhaps we should add factors to the equation that estimates the number of working probes that technological civilizations deploy and how long they might last. -rabjab ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 20:32:49 GMT From: Larry Klaes Subject: Light Pollution Information Sources Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.space,sci.misc,sci.environment,talk.environment,sci.energy I have two sources to assist in the light pollution battle: The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) is one of your best resources for material on light pollution. Their address is: International Dark-Sky Association Dave Crawford, President 3545 N. Stewart Tucson, Arizona 85716 U.S.A. E-Mail Address: crawford@noao.edu As the Editor of the Electronic Journal of the Astronomical Society of the Atlantic (EJASA), an electronic periodical dedicated to the promotion and enjoyment of astronomy and space exploration published each month on USENET, I have available the following EJASA articles on light pollution: "Stopping Space and Light Pollution", by Larry Klaes and Phil Karn - September 1989 "When the Light Gets in Your Eyes, You Shouldn't Have to Drive to the Country", by James Smith and Ken Poshedly - February 1991 "Curbing Light Pollution in Ohio", by Robert Bunge - June 1991 "Street Lights: The Real Cost", by Steve and Stephanie Binkley - August 1991 "The Battle Against Light Pollution in Central Ohio", by Earl W. Phillips, Jr. - September 1991 You may find these EJASA articles through the ASA anonymous FTP site at chara.gsu.edu (131.96.5.29), or you may E-Mail me for the issues. Good luck! Larry Klaes klaes@verga.enet.dec.com or - ...!decwrl!verga.enet.dec.com!klaes or - klaes%verga.dec@decwrl.enet.dec.com or - klaes%verga.enet.dec.com@uunet.uu.net "All the Universe, or nothing!" - H. G. Wells EJASA Editor, Astronomical Society of the Atlantic ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 93 16:05:14 EST From: Tom <18084TM@msu.edu> Subject: McElwaine >> ALTERNATIVE Comet Rendezvous Mission [...] >I remember seeing this almost a year ago. It is the same exact article. >Someone posted that they wanted info on McEwaine to complain. I had suggested, amidst arguments about what to do with McElwaine, that we wait for him to resume his behavior after telling him our problems, before we nail him to the wall (since that was what many suggested). Removing Net access is a serious thing, after all. You know; benefit of the doubt. Well, people did complain, and now he's still (re-)posting his stuff, so, if someone wants to go after him, I won't have a problem with it. He got a decent warning. >sheesh. if there's anything worse than crackpot posts, it's gotta be >*recycled* crackpot posts. I'd rather not see any long, re-re-cycled posts, regardless how good they were. I've ignored this ALTERNATIVE COMETY thing at least 10 times. -Tommy Mac ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tom McWilliams | 517-355-2178 (work) \\ Inhale to the Chief! 18084tm@ibm.cl.msu.edu | 336-9591 (hm)\\ Zonker Harris in 1996! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 93 20:05:27 GMT From: Greg Moore Subject: NASA and gold Newsgroups: sci.space In article <10MAR199321032826@judy.uh.edu> wingo%cspara.decnet@Fedex.MSfc.Nasa.Gov writes: > >This is scary when this question is posed by someone at NASA hq. > Careful here Dennis. You know as well as I do that not everyone at NASA works in the SPACE end. Remember what that first A stands for. Besides, at a headquarters, they are probably dealing more with paperwork than metal work. Be fair to the person. >Dennis, University of Alabama in Huntsville > ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 93 17:37:28 EST From: Tom <18084TM@msu.edu> Subject: Retraining at NASA >>>[Does NASA's charter say it is] a welfare agency for engineers and >>>MIS managers? I must've lost that page. >>It isn't. But it's a fact of life, like it or not. >>Go work the numbers. So what are you supposed to do with these people, have >>them flip burgers? Nick sez; >This raises a really good point. Here we have a very sad story, >thousands of managers and engineers who have been working on obsolete >projects in an political climate where..., ` >I really feel for these people. If you had this stuff on your >resume, you wouldn't have a comet's chance in the sun's core >of your resume landing anywhere but the trash: >[sad tale of the effects of no competetion or marketing deleted] >I'm no fan of Bill Clinton, but he has one good idea, >and that's retraining programs for obsolete workers. [Ideas for retraing deleted] >If NASA engineers & managers balk at this retraining program... IF!? Whaddya mean 'if'? They already are balking. Look how people react when it's suggested that NASA isn't doing a very good job. Mention competition, and they bemoan job loss, National Prestige, etc. Mention cost accounting and they hide behind Congress, as if you could have a NASA without a Congress. Look on the bright side. If people continue to try to get jobs at NASA, then, 5 or 10 years from now, when it finally is closed down, or at least scaled back, the people that get displaced can't bitch about no warning. You people from NASA, reading this now, go warn your friends. Cuz the options, from what I can see, are either scale NASA back, and let the free market take a shot at using space resources, or run out of dough, with no space frontier to solve the problem, because NASA let it slide one or two decades too long. Then NASA will get scaled back anyway, out of uselessness. At least now parts of NASA are useful and good. Maybe they should lobby for breaking NASA into parts, before the political mire brings down what parts of NASA are any good. I really like the things JPL, for example, does; Low cost, high info. value, and the public likes it a lot. Why not get their own funding, seperate from NASA? -Tommy Mac ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tom McWilliams | 517-355-2178 (work) \\ Inhale to the Chief! 18084tm@ibm.cl.msu.edu | 336-9591 (hm)\\ Zonker Harris in 1996! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 22:17:35 GMT From: David Pugh Subject: Solar Array vs. Power Tether SSF Drag Newsgroups: sci.space In article , kcarroll@zoo.toronto.edu (Kieran A. Carroll) writes: |> Oh well, tethers create 5 times as much drag as this, for the |> same amount of power generated. If you want to generate electricity |> by burning hydrazine, it looks like you'd be better off doing |> it in an APU, which wouldn't affect your orbital altitude... |> -- |> Kieran A. Carroll @ U of Toronto Aerospace Institute |> uunet!attcan!utzoo!kcarroll kcarroll@zoo.toronto.edu OK ... how about running backwards? If tether drag > array drag, then (assuming reasonable efficiencies), tether thrust should also be greater than the array drag. Does it make sense to increase the size of the solar power arrays and dump the "excess" energy into a tether? A nice bonus is that the larger arrays could also supply high demand, short durration experiments. A down side is that running the tether boost almost continually might mess up some microgravity experiments. Then again, Fred may not be a good place for microgravity research (too many astronauts jumping around). Of course, as bad as jumping astronauts are, it still beats trying to do micro- gravity research on Earth (:-). Any hope of getting a man-tended free flyer in an orbit that would allow it to be tended from Fred? I seem to remember the ESA talking about something like that, but don't know if it died from lack of funds or because of safety concerns. -- ... He was determined to discover the David Pugh underlying logic behind the universe. ...!seismo!cmucs!dep Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one. _Mort_, Terry Pratchett ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 20:14:00 GMT From: Charles Pooley Subject: SSI (Conestoga) adderss? Newsgroups: sci.space Does anyone have Internet add. for Space Services Inc, maker of the Conestoga rocket? Or the new parent company or the pres vp or any officer of SSI. Possible business. Email reply much appreciated..... -- Charles Pooley ckp@netcom.com GEnie c.pooley EE consultant, Los Angeles, CA ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 15:46:50 -0500 From: Nicholas Kramer Subject: Threat of mass cancellings was Re: Anonymity is NOT the issue Newsgroups: news.admin.policy,news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk,sci.space,alt.privacy (KK=Karl_Kleinpaste@cs.cmu.edu) ??> No-one has appointed you as the moderator of all the non-alt groups ??> retrospectively or otherwise, and no-one is likely to appoint anyone ??> else in such a position either. KK>Let's take that one again, from the other end of the same equation: KK>"No-one has appointed Johan the arbiter to inflict his unusual KK> news system on all the non-alt groups..." "Two wrongs does not make a right." I'm undecided about the anonymous service, but I think cancelling everything from there is overreaction and made more obnoxious because it is done by a single person. Nick ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 93 20:19:09 GMT From: Ken Garrido Subject: Threat of mass cancellings was Re: Anonymity is NOT the issue Newsgroups: news.admin.policy,news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk,sci.space,alt.privacy A person (who shall remain anonymous heehee) spake thusly : > I am testing a shell script to carry out "Automated Retroactive >Minimal Moderation" in response to Julf's (and your) suggestion that >the only way to control anonymous posting to groups that don't want it >is through moderation. It cancels articles posted from anon.penet.fi. >I've tested it on recycled postings with a "local" distribution and >it works nicely. I propose to arm "ARMM" with an unrestricted >distribution for the "sci" hierarchy this weekend if Julf doesn't >accept the proposed compromise or a reasonable alternative by then. Now I'm not a news wizard, but can't you generate a file which *automatically* screens the messages which are presented to you ? That file contains regular expressions which match offensive topics and user ids ? I'm not keen on anonymous posting, but I'm also not keen on fundamentalist christian ravings, censorship, sexual practices involving foods, discussions of yugoslavian culture, etc. So when I encounter those things, I _just_ _don't_ _listen_. Why don't we _just_ _not_ _listen_ to anonymous posts ? -- There is no God save Entropy and His prophet is Darwin. Ken Garrido keng@tunfaire.den.mmc.com Martin Marietta Aerospace ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 93 23:56:22 GMT From: Bill Stewart +1-908-949-0705 Subject: Threat of mass cancellings was Re: Anonymity is NOT the issue Newsgroups: news.admin.policy,news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk,sci.space,alt.privacy In response to the anonymous mass assassination proposal, In article <1993Mar12.162139.826@jato.jpl.nasa.gov> dave@jato.jpl.nasa.gov (Dave Hayes) writes: How very nice of you. Have you considered that your actions may cause many news admins to cancel all control messages coming from your site? This brings up an interesting technical problem - for the popular news distribution systems, e.g. C News, NNTP, etc., who wins the race between a control message and a site's killfile, if it has one? Can you set up an appropriately designed killfile to kill clumsily-forged cancel messages? -- # Pray for peace; Bill # Bill Stewart 1-908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.att.com AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ # Sacrifice is when you give up something valuable that's *yours*. # Making other people give up valuable things of *theirs* is called # other things :-) Keep your politicians honest out there! ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 93 17:03:04 GMT From: boyd johnson Subject: Winding trails from rocket Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.meteorology,sci.space In article cain@geomag.gly.fsu.edu (Joe Cain) writes: >In article <1993Mar11.144024.1@stsci.edu> zellner@stsci.edu writes: >>In article <1993Mar10.225944.1010@spectra.com>, johnson@spectra.com (boyd johnson) writes: >> >> > It always seems to resemble something like what you'd get if you took >> > the northern lights (aurora borealis) stretched them out, then let it >> > snap into a tangled mess. > >the direction of glow streamers from gases due to the aurora should be >oriented along the ambient magnetic field. i.e. the energizing >particles should be painting the field lines. Thus there should be no >"kinks" I used the comparison to aurora because the trail was multi-colored. However it disappeared when no longer illuminated by the sun. I believe this would be caused by a rainbow effect of solar refraction rather than magnetic field influence. From what I recall the colors did not curve with the trail, but were stratified in horizontal bands. A related question; Are the aurora (borealis & australis) in direct sunlight at the high latitudes they are at or does the solar radiation (of whatever frequency causes it) bend toward the earth to cause the fluorescence? I realized after posting the original article most Southern Californians can't relate to the aurora, since we don't see them here. However, being raised 30 miles from Canada I saw them a lot. >>We used to launch in evening twilight, when the ground was dark but the trails >>at high altitudes would be in sunlight. > >Some of the luminous trails launched from Wallops were barium releases >so the material ionized by solar uv would respond to the electric >fields in the presence of the geomagnetic field. ... >Alternately, were the trails responding to a neutral wind? Does neutral wind mean electrically uncharged air currents? I'm taking the liberty of quoting from a reply that I received via email from another witness of this week's launch that has an incoming only usenet site. From: Dave Cox This was a Minuteman ballistic missile being fired to Kwajelin (sp?) atoll in the Marshall islands. The breakup and bending of the contrail is indeed do to strong winds at very high altitude. It did occur to me that a rocket might have gone totally berzurk, but it would be destroyed long before it could create anything of that scope. That was a spectacular one, wasn't it? Thanks to all who replied. -- ====== Boyd Johnson nosc!spectra.com!johnson San Diego, California ====== Intermittent newsfeed at best and only to selected groups. My opinions certainly don't match those of my employer. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 22:03:49 GMT From: Brad Whitehurst Subject: Winding trails from rocket Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.space,sci.geo.meteorology In article <1993Mar12.170751.17219@acc.com> art@acc.com (Art Berggreen) writes: >In article <1993Mar10.225944.1010@spectra.com> johnson@spectra.com (boyd johnson) writes: >>I'm new to these groups, so flame me easy if this is a FAQ. >> >>I'm sure many of you in Southern California saw the rocket contrail from >>Vandenberg Air Force Base last night (Tuesday) at sunset. I have never >>seen one as it is created, but have seen it many times some time after >>it happens. ... >>Is it the wind currents that twists the contrail or does the rocket >>follow a looping, circling route? Also, it is always the same time of >>day. Is this the only time the contrails are visible from a distance, >>or is it when the best atmospheric conditions exist for launch? >>I am about 250 miles from VAFB, so I assume it is visible from >>beyond the Mexican border to San Francisco or so. >> >I grew up about 25 mi. from VAFB and have seen quite a few launches. >(Watching a staging during a night launch is especially impressive) > >The missile usually follows a fairly straight course as it arcs out above the >pacific on its way. The ballistic missile tests are usually aimed at the >Quagualeen (sp?) Atoll in the pacific. Orbital launches are often headed ^^^^^^^^^^ Kwajalein, I believe. -- Brad Whitehurst | Aerospace Research Lab rbw3q@Virginia.EDU | We like it hot...and fast. ------------------------------ End of Space Digest Volume 16 : Issue 308 ------------------------------