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 ; Tue, 26 Sep 89 01:33:59 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU Date: Tue, 26 Sep 89 01:33:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: SPACE Digest V10 #74 SPACE Digest Volume 10 : Issue 74 Today's Topics: Time Urgent: Voyager movies Oct 2 on satellite or tape space news from Aug 14 AW&ST Re: Soviet Probe to Mars More accessable Mars "face" reference VOYAGER 1 and Pluto. Re: VOYAGER 1 and Pluto. Re: Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized??? Re: First group of prospective astronauts to arrive at JSC (Forwarded) First group of prospective astronauts to arrive at JSC (Forwarded) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 25 Sep 89 17:38 CDT From: Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey Subject: Time Urgent: Voyager movies Oct 2 on satellite or tape Original_To: SPACE If you've got access to a satellite dish and VCR (I don't), get ready to tape some juicy Voyager stuff. If not, you can buy the tape. Here's a press release I just received from JPL: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The recently completed Neptune Encounter Highlights tape will be transmitted over NASA-Select on Monday, October 2. SATELLITE VIDEO SOURCE: GE SATCOM F2R* Transponder 13 71 W. Longitude 3960 MHz, vertical polarization C-band * Institutions that are interested in receiving the transmission over NASA-Select but are located in Alaska and Hawaii are requested to contact Terry Brooks at (818)354-6278. DATE/TIME: October 2 1:00-1:29 PM Eastern Time, 9:00-9:29 AM Pacific Time If you miss the transmission, copies of this tape may be ordered directly from our contracting video company: The Video Tape Company 10545 Burbank Blvd. North Hollywood, CA 91601 (818)985-1666 Cost: 3/4" $47.00 1/2" $34.40 ------------------------ Some highlights of the tape: Computer animations: viewing Neptune from Triton, diving over Neptune to meet Triton, catching Triton in its retrograde orbit, encountering Neptune's magnetopause, close encounters with Neptune and Triton, view from Earth of Voyager's occultation, Voyager encounters Neptune and Triton [4:34 extravaganza, I presume one of those great Jim Blinn encounter movies], nodding image motion compensation. That's the first ten minutes. Created from actual Voyager images: Neptune rotation movie, Neptune approach movie, Neptune weather movies, Neptune global rotation, real-time images, Voyager at Triton [3-d perspective], Neptune's rings, Neptune's atmospheric features, Neptune's atmosphere in motion, the Great Dark Spot, flight over Triton [3-d perspective], a farewell. ===================================================== ______meson Bill Higgins _-~ ____________-~______neutrino Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory - - ~-_ / \ ~----- proton Bitnet: HIGGINS@FNALB.BITNET | | \ / SPAN/Hepnet/Physnet: 43011::HIGGINS - - ~ Internet: HIGGINS@FNALB.FNAL.GOV P.S. I post this message *purely* as an altruistic public service. However, if you live in the Chicago area, and you want to show your gratitude, you might consider slipping me a copy of this tape... ------------------------------ Date: 25 Sep 89 01:40:05 GMT From: gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: space news from Aug 14 AW&ST Cover story this issue is the Pegasus roll-out. Nice-looking bird. All white rather than the black seen in artists' conceptions, with no markings at all. The one thing slightly surprising about it, to me, was that the trailer it's on looks like it was built to carry 747s -- it's very massive. [Built to handle Pegasus's larger successors?] This Pegasus is complete except that its solid motors are filled with inert ballast rather than live fuel, for captive-carry tests. The tests will mostly check out the old X-15 pylon and Pegasus's adapter (necessary because the attachment points aren't in the same places as those of the X-15); no drop tests of the inert Pegasus are planned. The carry tests will lead up to launch in October. Total development costs up to first launch are estimated at $50M; Hercules/OSC expect to recover this within the first 20 launches. At the moment there are either 2 or 3 firm launch bookings, depending on how you count. OSC expects 2 launches this year and 4-5 next year; the assembly tooling could support 12/year. There is growing interest in launching small payloads, especially as a way to get flight opportunities out of shrinking government budgets. The first payload is a DARPA data-relay satellite and a pair of NASA chemical-release experiments. Launch will occur about 60 miles west of Big Sur, so that Pegasus will be visible to the Western Test Range equipment at Vandenberg. Congress orders DoD to prepare a comprehensive plan for military comsat requirements and programs for the next decade, saying that the Pentagon's comsat architecture is in a "state of complete disarray". House Appropriations Committee staff launches inquiry into the space station, based on suspicions that a lot of the money is not really going into technical development. [What a surprise.] NASA initial FY91 budget submission was for $17G, lowered to $14G after OMB got a first glance at it. The wishlist includes two orbiters, Shuttle-C, the space-station lifeboat, and a large assortment of science missions including Mission To Earth and Gravity Probe B. SDI defers decision on whether to proceed with current plans or switch the main-line effort to something else (e.g. Brilliant Pebbles), pending a major review. Congress expresses some skepticism about SDI chasing fashionable ideas rather than getting its act together. Soviet spysat, Cosmos 2030, explodes in orbit. Believed to have been detonated deliberately after maneuvering control was lost. This happened in low orbit and most of the debris has reentered already. The Soviet spysat programs have been very busy of late, for no obvious reason. Cosmos 1870 radarsat commanded into destructive reentry, after the two-year-old satellite started to fail. A second large radarsat is scheduled to go up next year, and there are hopes of commercial sales of data once the third -- intended as an operational, rather than experimental, bird -- goes up in 1992. STS-28 deploys advanced imaging spysat Aug 8. Satellite is an upgraded version of the KH-11 [i.e. the KH-12? not clear]. This bird is at a lower altitude than the Lacrosse launched last year, and was deployed using the arm, which Lacrosse wasn't. A small secondary payload, developed by JPL and Goddard, possibly for SDI, is believed to have remained aboard; seven other unidentified experiments were aboard. NASA is very pleased that Columbia is back in service, given the demand for shuttle flights. Remaining shuttle missions this year are 34 (Atlantis carrying Galileo, Oct 12), 33 (Discovery with a DoD payload, Nov 19), and 32 (Columbia carrying a comsat and the gear for LDEF retrieval, Dec 18). NASA-industry team reviews options for handling possible space-station budget cuts. Top on the list is cutting the crew from 8 to 4; there are a bunch of other minor things that might be done, but none with any big impact. Ariane 44LP [first flight of the biggest Ariane 4 configuration] booster launches Hipparcos star mapper and TVSat 2 broadcast satellite. [AW&ST jumped the gun a bit and claimed that they were launched into Clarke orbit, which as regular readers know isn't true: Hipparcos's apogee motor refused to fire, to the consternation of ESA's science team.] France approves development of Spot 4, ensuring continuation of the Spot program. The one change made in the project to gain approval was deletion of a multispectral scanner for crop/vegetation work, which would have required substantial expansion of support facilities. Design lifetime is five years, compared to three for Spots 1-3. The spacecraft bus will be the same one planned for Helios, France's military spysat being developed for launch in 1993. Spot 4 should go up about 1994, in time to take over from the earlier Spots [Spot 1 is in orbit and still mostly working, Spot 2 is being readied for launch, Spot 3 is in storage for later launch]. Classified ad for tour of soviet space facilities in Moscow and Leningrad, Nov 3-12. [This got considerable attention in sci.space a month or so ago, so I'll just repeat the inquiries address rather than the whole ad: Aerospace Marketing Group, 4131 Spicewood Springs Road, Suite G-4, Austin TX 78759, (512)338-4800.] -- "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: 14 Sep 89 15:59:30 GMT From: jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@rutgers.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Soviet Probe to Mars In article <16367@watdragon.waterloo.edu> dapike@dahlia.waterloo.edu (David Pike) writes: >... According to CTV, among the last photos to get out showed >SOMETHING coming at it!! ... >If anybody out there knows what I'm talking about, please let me know >what is supposed to have REALLY happened... A slightly garbled report. The facts are: 1. Phobos 2 was supposed to turn away from Earth, snap some pictures of Phobos, and turn back to Earth to transmit them. It started this maneuver but did not complete it. 2. Some signals from P2 were picked up afterward, and they showed some indications that the probe might be spinning. 3. All attempts to re-establish communication were unsuccessful. 4. At least one of the pictures taken shortly before this showed what might have been an object nearby. If it was real, it might have been either (a) debris in Phobos's orbit, or (b) Phobos 2's own jettisoned propulsion module. 5. One major theory about the cause of the failure is that Phobos 2 collided with the unknown object. This is plausible. 6. The reason for the failure is not known for sure. -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 13 Sep 89 23:44:25 GMT From: g.gp.cs.cmu.edu!kck@pt.cs.cmu.edu (Karl Kluge) Subject: More accessable Mars "face" reference Try Mark Carlotto's paper in _Applied Optics_, May (?) 1988 ------------------------------ Date: 13 Sep 89 20:17:42 GMT From: wrksys.dec.com!klaes@decwrl.dec.com (CUP/ASG, MLO5-2/G1 6A, 223-3283) Subject: VOYAGER 1 and Pluto. How close will VOYAGER 1 come into range of the planet Pluto? I do not assume that it will be close enough for any data to be recorded. Thank you, Larry Klaes klaes@wrksys.dec.com or - ...!decwrl!wrksys.dec.com!klaes or - klaes%wrksys.dec@decwrl.dec.com or - klaes@wrksys.enet.dec.com EJASA Editor, Astronomical Society of the Atlantic N = R*fgfpneflfifaL ------------------------------ Date: 14 Sep 89 16:05:53 GMT From: jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@rutgers.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: VOYAGER 1 and Pluto. In article <8909132017.AA15076@decwrl.dec.com> klaes@wrksys.dec.com (CUP/ASG, MLO5-2/G1 6A, 223-3283) writes: > How close will VOYAGER 1 come into range of the planet Pluto? Not very. Looking at the whole solar system, V1 is sort of vaguely near Pluto. That means a few hundred million kilometers from it. It's not going to get any closer. -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 14 Sep 89 22:51:17 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!wayne@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Wayne Hayes) Subject: Re: Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized??? In article <1505@meccsd.MECC.MN.ORG> vin@meccsd.UUCP (Vincent J. Erickson) writes: >And where are your references? Or have you performed these experiments >yourself? Please forward us the data so we may all be impressed. Ok. First, I got the method wrong, but the effect is the same. As someone already pointed out, it's radiation pressure that causes small particles to spiral into the sun, not solar wind. From George O. Abell, _Exploration_ of_The_Universe 4th Ed. (1st year astronomy text at U of Toronto), p. 387 - 388: Particles smaller than about 1 micron in size are "blown" out of the solar system by radiation pressure. [Larger particles] spiral inward toward the Sun, because of the Poynting-Robertson effect... ... A particle 1 mm in diameter that originates in the region of the asteroid belt spirals into the Sun in only 10 million years. Even a particle 10 cm across at the Earth will spiral in given 10^8 years. Ok, so there's a question here. Are the smallest microbes larger or smaller than a micron? Biologists? >I never proposed such an idea as fact; if you had read my text I was >quite careful to be very forgiving of the fact that it could be >totally wrong. I wasn't really yelling at you personally, sorry. But I *still* think that it's impossible. The biggest step is still getting a microbe out of Earth's atmosphere. You can't accelerate a microbe up to 11 km /s to escape the Earth's gravity without a mighty big push. Any material thrown up by a huge meteor impact will probably be vapourized either by the impact with the Earth or the subsequent traversion through the atmosphere at more than 11 km / s. And even if it survives into space in a body of rock that was large enough to get through the atmosphere without at least melting, that body would NOT be pushed outward, but would subsequently spiral into the Sun, as the above quote shows. The average air particle at sea level travels at 5 km / sec (no reference here. We worked it out in second year physics lab. Gee, I guess I can say "Yeah, I *did* do the experiment myself, what's it to ya?" :-)) This speed decreases with mass of the particle (ask any thermal physicist). Microbes just don't go 11 km /s in our atmosphere, and survive, period. -- "If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith." -- Albert Einstein Wayne Hayes INTERNET: wayne@csri.toronto.edu CompuServe: 72401,3525 ------------------------------ Date: 15 Sep 89 01:38:51 GMT From: rochester!yamauchi@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu (Brian Yamauchi) Subject: Re: First group of prospective astronauts to arrive at JSC (Forwarded) In article <31891@ames.arc.nasa.gov> yee@trident.arc.nasa.gov (Peter E. Yee) writes: > Approximately 100 of the nearly 2500 total applicants are >expected to be interviewed here over the next several weeks for >an opportunity to be among the final 15 to 20 who will be named >as astronaut candidates in January 1990. Since I'm sure that these 100 meet the basic academic, professional, and medical requirements, on what basis are the final 15-20 chosen? _______________________________________________________________________________ Brian Yamauchi University of Rochester yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu Computer Science Department _______________________________________________________________________________ ------------------------------ Date: 15 Sep 89 00:40:02 GMT From: trident.arc.nasa.gov!yee@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Peter E. Yee) Subject: First group of prospective astronauts to arrive at JSC (Forwarded) Sarah Keegan Headquarters, Washington, D.C. September 14, 1989 Jeffrey Carr Johnson Space Center, Houston RELEASE: 89-143 FIRST GROUP OF PROSPECTIVE ASTRONAUTS TO ARRIVE AT JSC The first of several groups of prospective astronauts will arrive at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, on Monday, September 18, to begin a week of orientation, interviews and medical evaluations. Approximately 100 of the nearly 2500 total applicants are expected to be interviewed here over the next several weeks for an opportunity to be among the final 15 to 20 who will be named as astronaut candidates in January 1990. The first group of 20 will consist of Paul J. Bertsch, Johnson Space Center, Houston; Jay C. Buckey, M.D., Dallas, Texas; Leroy Chiao, Ph.D., Danville, Calif.; Michael R. Clifford (Maj., USA), Seabrook, Texas; David B. Cripps (Maj., USA), Edwards, Calif.; Steven R. Hamel (Lcdr, USN), Ft. Washington, Md; Bernard A. Harris, Jr., M.D., Johnson Space Center; David E. Hollowell, Ph.D., Los Alamos, N.Mexico; James A. Jones (Lcdr, USN) Virginia Beach, Va.; Michael E. Lopez-Alegria (Lt.,USN), Waldorf, Md.; Ellen Ochoa, Ph.D., Ames Research Center, Mountain View, Calif.; Thomas P. Phelan (Lt., USN), Hollywood, Md.; Kent V. Rominger (Lt., USN), California, Md.; James C. Seat (Maj., USAF), Edwards, Calif.; Mark D. Shackelford (Maj., USAF), Edwards, Calif.; Richard A. Stevens (Maj. USAF), Edwards, Calif.; Keith A. Taylor, Sc.D., Copley, Pa.; Donald A. Thomas, Ph.D., Johnson Space Center; Carl E. Walz (Capt., USAF), Henderson, Nev.; and Dorothy J. Zukor, Ph.D., NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. Astronaut selections are conducted on a bi-annual basis. The number of candidates selected every two years will vary based on flight rate, program requirements and attrition. ------------------------------ End of SPACE Digest V10 #74 *******************