Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V10_0/V10_030.TXT

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Subject: SPACE Digest V10 #30

SPACE Digest                                      Volume 10 : Issue 30

Today's Topics:
           Re: Voyager II Images Available
         NASA Headline News for 08/31/89 (Forwarded)
             Re: Voyager: Tape recorder?
       Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized???
       Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized???
           What's Wrong With HR2674. (long)
     Re: Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized???
             Re: Magnum snoopsat
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 31 Aug 89 05:45:14 GMT
From: bungia!orbit!pnet51![e-mail]  (S Schaper)
Subject: Re: Voyager II Images Available

How do I obtain any of these images? I am new to modeming ~1 month. If anyone
out there has transfered any of these to forms that can be used by the Atari
ST, esp. the .IM and .COL used by the PD AIM image processor, or even in Degas
or .tny, or even as a Macintosh screen dump, or Amiga .IFF, please e-mail me
how to obtain them, if you are willing to make them available. I am *very*
interested in playing with image-processing them, or other NASA planetary
photos. An additional note: Would this sort of thing make a good educational
project if JPL would in time release selected shots for processing for the
various home computers that are used in schools and colleges?


UUCP: {amdahl!bungia, uunet!rosevax, chinet, killer}!orbit!pnet51!schaper
ARPA: crash!orbit!pnet51![e-mail]
INET: [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 1 Sep 89 03:32:54 GMT
From: trident.arc.nasa.gov![e-mail]  (Peter E. Yee)
Subject: NASA Headline News for 08/31/89 (Forwarded)

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                           NASA Headline News
Thursday, August 31, 1989                     Audio:202-755-1788
-----------------------------------------------------------------

This is NASA Headline News for Thursday, August 31......


Yesterday at the Kennedy Space Center, the Jupiter-bound Galileo
spacecraft was successfully implemented into the payload bay of
the orbiter Atlantis.  Pre-launch processing of Atlantis and its
two sister ships will continue over the weekend, but will halt on
Monday so that workers may enjoy Labor Day.  Work will resume on
Tuesday.  Launch of atlantis and the five member STS-34 crew
remains targeted for October 12.

A small ceremony was conducted at the Kennedy Space Center
yesterday to commemorate the movement of Mobile Launcher Platform
number three into the Vehicle Assembly Building.  Stacking of
STS-32 flight hardware onto MLP 3 is slated to begin next week.
MLp 3 has been undergoing modifications for the past few years,
and STS-32 will mark the first time this platform will be used
for a shuttle launch.

Voyager's encounter with Neptune is winding down, but there is a
strong possibility that the spacecraft may be used to take a
"family photograph" of the Sun and its planets.  If approved, the
photograph would be taken next spring after Voyager has completed
all of its mission-specific assignments.  The spacecraft would
then continue its infinite journey through the Milky Way galaxy,
and beyond.

                      *        *         *























----------------------------------------------------------------
Here's the broadcast schedule for public affairs events on NASA
Select TV.  All times are Eastern............
----------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, August 31 through Wednesday, September 6........

NASA Update will be shown beginning at 11:30 A.M. today and will
repeat several times throughout the afternoon.  The next NASA
Select coverage will be at 1:30 P.M. on September 5 when the
STS-34 Lead Flight Director and Galileo Mission Managers host a
briefing and press conference.  The five-member STS-34 crew will
hold a press conference at 11:15 A.M. on September 6.
Transponder 13 on Satcom F2R.

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.

------------------------------

Date: 31 Aug 89 14:02:07 GMT
From: [e-mail]  (RAMontante)
Subject: Re: Voyager: Tape recorder?

[e-mail] (Terry Hancock) <[e-mail]> :
-
-    This is what happens when it takes 10 or 20 years for a
-spacecraft to get to its destination -- it's obsolete by the time
-it arrives!

...proving that "obsolete" is *not* a synonym for "abruptly unusable"!

Or, to put it another way, "State Of The Art" is technospeak for "unproven".

:-)

------------------------------

Date: 31 Aug 89 17:11:56 GMT
From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu![e-mail]  (Wayne Hayes)
Subject: Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized???

I remember hearing a ruckus awhile ago regarding the sterilization of the
the Galileo spacecraft's probe into Jupiter's atmosphere.  Aparently they
were out of funds to sterilize it.  Is this still true?

If it is, I think it's a *** MAJOR *** mistake, an incredibly
irresponsible mistake, to launch the atmospheric probe.  In the remote
possibility that Jupiter's atmosphere harbors indigenous life, we may
pollute the atmosphere with Earth's life and never know for sure whether
the life we later discover is in fact indigenous.  The fact that Jupiter
may be too hostile for Earth bacteria to survive, or that there may be
no life there, are simply risks I consider *much* too large.

Thoughts?
--
Wayne Hayes    INTERNET: [e-mail]    CompuServe: 72401,3525
"To boldly go where no programmer has g
readnews: segmentation fault -- core dumped

------------------------------

Date: 31 Aug 89 17:25:53 GMT
From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu![e-mail]  (Wayne Hayes)
Subject: Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized???

[Sorry if this is the second time you've seen this, I'm having problems
(again) with Pnews. (I tried to cancel the previous one, doesn't look like
it worked...)]

I remember hearing a ruckus awhile ago regarding the sterilization of the
the Galileo spacecraft's probe into Jupiter's atmosphere.  Aparently they
were out of funds to sterilize it.  Is this still true?

If it is, I think it's a *** MAJOR *** mistake, an incredibly
irresponsible mistake, to launch the atmospheric probe.  In the remote
possibility that Jupiter's atmosphere harbors indigenous life, we may
pollute the atmosphere with Earth's life and never know for sure whether
the life we later discover is in fact indigenous.  The fact that Jupiter
may be too hostile for Earth bacteria to survive, or that there may be
no life there, are simply risks I consider *much* too large.

Thoughts?
--
Wayne Hayes    INTERNET: [e-mail]    CompuServe: 72401,3525
"To boldly go where no programmer has g
readnews: segmentation fault -- core dumped

------------------------------

Date: 31 Aug 89 18:10:28 GMT
From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Kieran A. Carroll)
Subject: What's Wrong With HR2674. (long)

Regarding the HR2674 bill that William Baxter has made available
for us to read:

I am not sure that this bill would, if adopted, help much to achieve
a goal sought after by many space activists, to wit: the fairly
rapid development of much-less-expensive payload-to-orbit delivery
systems than are currently available.

I've heard arguments that space flight would become fairly commonplace
on its own, in its own time, with or without major government intervention.
These arguments also conclude that "in its own time" means "in 50 or 100
years"; this conclusion is arrived at by examining evolutionary improvements
in performance of aircraft, and extrapolating them to the performance required
of spacecraft. This leads to the conclusion that the moon-landings of the
1960's happened very much before they "should have", in the normal course of
events; the reasons for them happening so early were founded in cold
war national hysteria on the one hand, and the efforts by a small group of
rocketry "believers" (von Braun and company) to manipulate governments to
their own ends on the other hand. In other words, without von Braun and
Kennedy, a "naturally"-paced aviation industry would only now be
discovering space, and sending up experimental aerospace planes (X-15 style)
and the like.

Foe people like me, this is not enough. We have reasons for wanting the pace
of space transportation to be forced into high gear. We want bases on the
moon, solar power satellites, space manufacturing facilities and exploration
of the planets in our own lifetimes, >>not<< a couple of centuries down the
road. It seems to me that HR2674 will do more to restore space
transportation development to its "natural" pace, than it will to encourage it
to early maturity. This results because the main goals of the bill are
(a) to save the US Government money, by buying efficient (through
competition) commercial launch services rather than inefficient milspec ones,
and (b) to pull a blanket of protectionism over the US launcher industry, by
ensuring that a major customer (the US government) is restricted to "buy
American".

The second goal, protectionism, is usually a Bad Thing. The main reason for
including it in the bill seems to be because without it, if the first goal
were pursued, the US launcher industry would be killed dead by subsidized
foreign competition. There are other solutions possible, of course: for
example, the government could be permitted to buy launches from foreign
vendors, and tariffs could be put in place to remove the effects of
subsidies, to "level the playing field" (a familiar phrase in Canada these
days, what with free trade and all...).

The main problem, though, is the first goal. Saving the US government money
is a Good Thing in most circumstances. However, if we want to artificially
speed up the evolution of space launcher development, the way to do it is
>>not<< through paying the lowest possible price for launches -- the effects
of this would be to have launch companies cut costs to the bone, thus
reducing the attractiveness of providing services in this area, probably
resulting in only a few companies remaining in the business, probably forming
a cartel to keep other companies from springing up, thus living moderately
well in a protected-from-foreign-competition (protected-from->>real<<-
competition) environment. Through this process the companies that survived
>>would<< learn how to make launchers and operate them more efficiently, but
would do so >>slowly<< (What's the incentive to do so quickly? Doing so
quickly involves spending a fair whack of money on R&D, money that just
wouldn't be available in an environment where competition brought launch
prices down as-far-as-possible-using-currernt-levels-of-technology). HR2674
would have the effect of restoring the evolution of space launchers to its
natural, too-slow-as-far-as-I'm-concerned pace.

The way to speed up the pace is through an infusion of cash, to pay for the
needed R&D, and for the needed number of spacecraft that must be built in
order to test out the many ideas that have been proposed (and others that
will be dreamt up in the future) for improving efficiency. Kennedy prompted
Congress to provide such an infusion, through NASA's Apollo program. Congress
soon got tired of spending money, though, since which time NASA hasn't
contributed much to the advancement of the state of the art in launcher
design, construction or operations (most of the ideas that went into the
Shuttle came out of the Apollo days).

How do you infuse money into an area without the recipients becoming greedy,
and spending it on yachts and parties instead of rocket development? One way
is to hire dedicated people (fanatics like us, and von Braun) for whom
getting people into space cheap is a much bigger thrill than having a party
on a yacht. Unfortunately, the current crop of aerospace contracting
companies is not run by people like us; simply giving them lots of money
wouldn't necessarily produce the results we want to encourage.

The only proposal I've ever hear for infusing cash into the area in a useful
way is one based on the old Air Mail contracts that the US Government signed
during the early days of aviation. The government agreed to buy a certain
amount of flight services from private operators (in this case to fly mail
back and forth). They didn't try to get the best price possible through
competition, though; instead, they paid a >>deliberately high<< price,
>>regardless<< of the operator's actual costs. The incentive to bring costs
down, on the operator's part, was that by doing so his profits could grow to
even higher levels. Also, the money was available (through the
government-subsidized prices) to fund the R&D necessary to bring costs down
over the long term, and the incentive was there to make the long term as
short as possible.

Could this be made to work for space? Many people believe so. I think that
this sort of a thing would do a lot more towards the goals of space
enthusiasts, than would HR2674. Of course, there would be a cost to the US
Government. But, that cost would end up accomplishing something useful, and
that's one of the things that governments are supposed to be there for -- to
provide support for things that will provide long-term benefits. Also, I can
see protectionism being justifiably applied in this case -- if the government
is providing an unashamed subsidy to an industry in its country, why should
it provide the subsidy to the industries of other countries as well?

As a Canadian, it's not for me to say whether this bill should be supported
or opposed. As a space enthusiast, I think that (unless my arguments are
fundamentally unsound) I should encourage people to oppose it, >>and to
replace it with a bill enacting a space equivalent of the air mail
contracts<<, or something that would have similar effects.

Comments, anyone?
--

     Kieran A. Carroll @ U of Toronto Aerospace Institute
     uunet!attcan!utzoo!kcarroll [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 1 Sep 89 00:34:09 GMT
From: [e-mail]  (Andy Stadler)
Subject: Re: Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized???

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Paul Dietz) writes:
>
> [..regarding sterilization of Galileo to protect Jovian life..]
>
>The technophobes might worry, but I'm not going to.
>
>    Paul F. Dietz
>    [e-mail]

Why must concern for life and environment == technophobe?  I program computers
for a living, like to play with high-tech "toys", and support a strong
program of space exploration; yet the thought of accidentally contaminating
or even killing other yet unknown life forms scares and concerns me.

--Andy           [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 31 Aug 89 10:33:41 GMT
From: mcsun!ukc!icdoc!syma![e-mail]  (Nick Watkins)
Subject: Re: Magnum snoopsat

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (David
Palmer) writes:
>I have heard of a US spy satellite (electronic signal gathering) called Magnum.
>What I have heard, from not-necessarily-reliable sources is:
>    1) 100 meter dish!
See below.
>    2) Geosynchronous orbit (presumably at the longitude of Moscow)
According to Des Ball in "Pine Gap", (Allen & Unwin Australia,1988) it
is at 70 degrees East. READ THIS BOOK !!! [not a flame, just a recommendation]
>    3) Sends data to the spy nest at Pine Gap, Australia.
Yes.
>My questions are:
>    0) Really?
Apparently so.
>    1) Is it really 100 meters in diameter?
Ball thinks so.
>    2) What wavelengths can it handle?
"100 MHz through microwave to >25GHz" says Ball.
>    3) How do they deploy such a monster?
Launch to GEO on IUS and then unfold it, see p.27 of op. cit.
>    4) How much would another one cost?  (Put it out way beyond GEO,
>          etc etc.
Bearing in mind the technology has been evolving since 1966 at least
(first related launch was in mid 1970, of the first Rhyolite) ask
yourself why it hasn't happened already, and draw your own conclusions.
In fairness I should also note the large antennae on ATS6 and TDRSS,
technology does diffuse somewhat.

Nick
--
Nick Watkins, Space & Plasma Physics Group, School of Mathematical
& Physical Sciences, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton, E.Sussex, BN1 9QH, ENGLAND
JANET: [e-mail]   BITNET: [e-mail]
Voice: [phone]

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V10 #30
*******************