Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 05:00:05 From: Space Digest maintainer Reply-To: Space-request@isu.isunet.edu Subject: Space Digest V16 #493 To: Space Digest Readers Precedence: bulk Space Digest Wed, 28 Apr 93 Volume 16 : Issue 493 Today's Topics: Boom! Whoosh...... Command Loss Timer (Re: Galileo Update - 04/22/93) France spied on by the U.S. Gamma Ray Bursters. WHere are they. I want that Billion NASA Ames server (was Re: Space Station Redesign, JSC Alternative #4) TRUE "GLOBE", Who makes it? 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: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 07:02:27 GMT From: Robin Kenny Subject: Boom! Whoosh...... Newsgroups: sci.space David Fuzzy Wells (wdwells@nyx.cs.du.edu) wrote: : I love the idea of an inflatable 1-mile long sign.... It will be a : really neat thing to see it explode when a bolt (or even better, a : Westford Needle!) comes crashing into it at 10 clicks a sec. : Whooooooooshhhhhh...... : ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Just a thought... (let's pretend it IS INFLATED and PRESSURIZED) wouldn't there be a large static electricity build up around the puncture? If the metalization is behind a clear sandwich (ie. insulated) then the deflating balloon would generate electrical interference - "noise" By the way, any serious high velocity impact would simply cut a "Bugs Bunny" hole through the wall, highly unlikely to "BOOM", and the fabric would almost certainly be ripstop. Regards, Robin Kenny - a private and personal opinion, not in any way endorsed, authorised or known by my employers. ______________________________________________________________________ What the heck would I know about Space? I'm stuck at the bottom of this huge gravity well! ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1993 23:53:12 GMT From: Dave Tholen Subject: Command Loss Timer (Re: Galileo Update - 04/22/93) Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.astro,alt.sci.planetary Alan Carter writes: >> 3. On April 19, a NO-OP command was sent to reset the command loss timer to >> 264 hours, its planned value during this mission phase. > This activity is regularly reported in Ron's interesting posts. Could > someone explain what the Command Loss Timer is? The name is rather descriptive. It's a command to the spacecraft that tells it "If you don't hear from Earth after 264 hours, assume something is wrong with your (the spacecraft) attitude, and go into a preprogrammed search mode in an attempt to reacquire the signal from Earth." The spacecraft and Earth are not in constant communication with each other. Earth monitors the telemetry from the spacecraft, and if everything is fine, there's no reason to send it any new information. But from the spacecraft's point of view, no information from Earth could mean either everything is fine, or that the spacecraft has lost signal acquisition. Just how long should the spacecraft wait before it decides that something is wrong and begins to take corrective action? That "how long" is the command loss timer. During relatively inactive cruise phases, the command loss timer can be set to rather long values. In this case, Earth is telling Galileo "expect to hear back from us sometime within the next 264 hours". ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Apr 93 15:38:32 MET From: PHARABOD@FRCPN11.IN2P3.FR Subject: France spied on by the U.S. A young French skeptic, who reads (skeptically) the UFO review OVNI Presence (O.P.), sent me the following excerpt from an August 92 issue of this review (R.G. = Robert Galley, French minister of defense in 1974, answering about the Belgian UFO wave): "O.P. : Can you conceive that the U.S. could allow themselves to send their most modern crafts over foreign territory, with the Belgian hierarchy ignoring that ?" "R.G. : Absolutely ! The best proof which I can give is that, some time ago, without informing the French authorities, the U.S. based in Germany sent a plane to make photos of Pierrelatte (*). We followed this plane, and, after its landing on the Ramstein airport, Colonel X got back the shots of Pierrelatte. The U.S. had not informed us..." (*) There is an important military plant of enrichment of uranium at Pierrelatte (Drome). What kind of plane could it be ? Surely not an SR-71, which our planes could not follow (and still can't)... J. Pharabod ------------------------------ Date: 26 Apr 93 15:59:15 EST From: jbatka@desire.wright.edu Subject: Gamma Ray Bursters. WHere are they. Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.astro I assume that can only be guessed at by the assumed energy of the event and the 1/r^2 law. So, if the 1/r^2 law is incorrect (assume some unknown material [dark matter??] inhibits Gamma Ray propagation), could it be possible that we are actually seeing much less energetic events happening much closer to us? The even distribution could be caused by the characteristic propagation distance of gamma rays being shorter then 1/2 the thickness of the disk of the galaxy. Just some idle babbling, -- Jim Batka | Work Email: BATKAJ@CCMAIL.DAYTON.SAIC.COM | Elvis is | Home Email: JBATKA@DESIRE.WRIGHT.EDU | DEAD! 64 years is 33,661,440 minutes ... and a minute is a LONG time! - Beatles: _ Yellow Submarine_ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 19:38:01 GMT From: Henry Spencer Subject: I want that Billion Newsgroups: sci.space In article <1rh4rqINNi7o@mojo.eng.umd.edu> sysmgr@king.eng.umd.edu writes: >>>You'd need to launch HLVs to send up large amounts of stuff. Do you know >>>of a private Titan pad? >>Nobody who is interested in launching things cheaply will buy Titans. It >>doesn't take many Titan pricetags to pay for a laser launcher or a large >>gas gun or a development program for a Big Dumb Booster, all of which >>would have far better cost-effectiveness. > >Henry, I made the assumption that he who gets there firstest with the mostest >wins. Only if he doesn't spend more than a billion dollars doing it, since the prize is not going to be scaled up to match the level of effort. You can spend a billion pretty quickly buying Titan launches. What's more, if you buy Titans, the prize money is your entire return on investment. If you develop a new launch system, it has other uses, and the prize is just the icing on the cake. I doubt very much that a billion-dollar prize is going to show enough return to justify the investment if you are constrained to use current US launchers. (There would surely be a buy-American clause in the rules for such a prize, since it would pretty well have to be government-funded.) You're going to *have* to invest your front money in building a new launch system rather than pissing it away on existing ones. Being there first is of no importance if you go bankrupt doing it. >... could I get a couple of CanadARMs tuned for the lunar environment? I >wanna do some teleoperated prospecting while I'm up there... I'm sure Spar would offer to develop such a lunar-tuned system and deliver a couple of them to you for only a couple of hundred million dollars. -- SVR4 resembles a high-speed collision | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology between SVR3 and SunOS. - Dick Dunn | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry ------------------------------ Date: 26 Apr 93 16:36:12 -0600 From: Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey Subject: NASA Ames server (was Re: Space Station Redesign, JSC Alternative #4) Newsgroups: sci.space In article <1993Apr26.152722.19887@aio.jsc.nasa.gov>, kjenks@jsc.nasa.gov (Ken Jenks [NASA]) writes: > I just posted the GIF files out for anonymous FTP on server ics.uci.edu. [...] > Sorry it took > me so long to get these out, but I was trying for the Ames server, > but it's out of space. How ironic. Bill Higgins, Beam Jockey | "Treat your password like Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory | your toothbrush. Don't let Bitnet: HIGGINS@FNAL.BITNET | anybody else use it-- Internet: HIGGINS@FNAL.FNAL.GOV | and get a new one every SPAN/Hepnet: 43011::HIGGINS | six months." --Cliff Stoll ------------------------------ Date: 26 Apr 1993 19:37:39 GMT From: steve hix Subject: TRUE "GLOBE", Who makes it? Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.space In article bill@xpresso.UUCP (Bill Vance) writes: >It has been known for quite a while that the earth is actually more pear >shaped than globular/spherical. Does anyone make a "globe" that is accurate >as to actual shape, landmass configuration/Long/Lat lines etc.? The variance from perfect sphericity in a model of the earth small enough to fit into your home would probably be imperceptible. Any globe you can buy will be close enough. -- ------------------------------------------------------- | Some things are too important not to give away | | to everybody else and have none left for yourself. | |------------------------ Dieter the car salesman-----| ------------------------------ End of Space Digest Volume 16 : Issue 493 ------------------------------