Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V10_1/V10_113.TXT

Internet Message Format | 1991-07-08 | 18KB

Return-path: <[e-mail]>
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/[e-mail] (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests)
          ID </afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/Mailbox/AZ=3lHi00VcJA=lE48>;
          Fri,  6 Oct 89 01:47:00 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID: <IZ=3knW00VcJ4=[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail]
From: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]
Date: Fri,  6 Oct 89 01:46:29 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: SPACE Digest V10 #113

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 10 : Issue 113

Today's Topics:
   Re: YAHSS (Yet Another Henry Spencer Signature) or Trump Station
   Re: YAHSS (Yet Another Henry Spencer Signature) or Trump Station
            Re: Alternate Voyager Missions
               Hipparcos Status Report
           Re: NSS invitations to witness a shuttl
       Re: NASA Headline News for 09/27/89 (Forwarded)
              Great Apollo book
   Re: YAHSS (Yet Another Henry Spencer Signature) or Trump Station
           Galileo, Protest, Argumentation
              NSS Hotline Update 9/27/89
     Re: Trying to build a fluxgate magnetometer -- help!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 2 Oct 89 17:19:33 GMT
From: milton!maven![e-mail]  (Games Wizard)
Subject: Re: YAHSS (Yet Another Henry Spencer Signature) or Trump Station

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Phil Nelson) writes:
> In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Games Wizard) writes:
>
>>WHY would Donald trump be interested in space?
>
>>launch facility?  Remember that he wants a 1 mile high facility in N.Y.
>>and they wont let him build that!!! (yet)
>
>  This guy is thinking too small, why does he mess around with 1 mile high
> when he could be 100 miles high? Why not build a mile-long structure in LEO?
> Or, if it's towers he wants, he should build, say, 6 miles high, on the Moon.
> Of course, a tower on the moon isn't much use, how about a lunar escape
> velocity catapult? still pretty big, and a lot more likely to make some
> money back.
>
>  Who is going to be impressed with one more TV tower in NYC? Who needs it?
>
> Phil Nelson at (but not speaking for)                  OnTyme:NSC.P/Nelson
> Tymnet, ?McDonnell Douglas? Network Systems Company     Voice:408-922-7508
> UUCP:{pyramid|ames}oliveb!tymix!pnelson              LRV:Component Station

Sorry if I was not clear, Trump does not want a tower, he wants a BUILDING,
and he wants it big, and he wants it to cover a lot of ground.  He has bought
a lot of the necessary ground there, but they won't let him build.
We are talking several HUNDRED stories of retail, office, residencial, etc...
whatever he can pack in to the thing to make a buck.

It is clear that this magnitude project puts him in the league where he is
willing to committ a LARGE ammount of money to see his name in lights
(or on the side of the building ).  The question is :

        How does one convince him that a space station,
            or a space shuttle, or any space project x
            is worth HIS getting involved.
        And if he did WANT to get involved would the Government
            let him?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trendy footer by:
            John Stevens-Schlick
            Internet?: [e-mail]
            7720 35'th Ave S.W. Seattle, Wa. 98126
            (206) 935 - 4384
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My boss dosen't know what I do.

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

Date: 3 Oct 89 03:49:24 GMT
From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: YAHSS (Yet Another Henry Spencer Signature) or Trump Station

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Bill Wisner) writes:
>The government could, perhaps, stop Trump from launching a vehicle into
>orbit, although they probably wouldn't. But once he gets into orbit he
>can pretty much do what he wants, can't he?

Would that it were so.  Legally, the US government is responsible for
anything he does up there, so you better believe they'll want some
authority over it.  Yes, it is dumb that the government, not Trump,
is held responsible... but that's the way it is, by international treaty.
[Insert obligatory nasty comments about State Dept. idiots who negotiate
such treaties without thinking about what they mean.  At least the Moon
Treaty got stopped, thanks to the late lamented L5 Society.]

As I've mentioned before, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation
can block any US launch they feel like blocking, and they don't have to
give reasons.  If Trump does something after his first launch that the
government doesn't like, he won't get to do it again.
--
Nature is blind; Man is merely |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
shortsighted (and improving).  | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

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

Date: 3 Oct 89 02:35:28 GMT
From: zephyr.ens.tek.com!wrgate!mrloog![e-mail]  (Dan Tilque;6291545;92-101;OPUS_SW;)
Subject: Re: Alternate Voyager Missions

Tom Neff writes:
>Or, if they all bounce real hard at 250AU and start coming back, we'll
>know our solar system model needs some work. :-)

Surely you've heard of the Celetial Sphere?  The one that the fixed stars
are attached to?

---
Dan Tilque    --    [e-mail]

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

Date: 30 Sep 89 14:19:41 GMT
From: mcsun!hp4nl!esatst![e-mail]  (Neil Dixon)
Subject: Hipparcos Status Report

The following is reproduced from 'Estec News' (28th Sep 1989),
published by ESTEC Public Relations Office.


            Hipparcos status report

Hipparcos was launched on August 9, 1989 from Kourou, French Guiana,
on an Ariane 4 launcher. The launch was a success but at the 4th
apogee, 37 hours after the launch, on 10 August, the satellite's Apogee
Boost Motor (ABM) did not ignite.  ABM firing attempts were repeated
between 10 and 25 August at the 6th, the 11th, the 20th and again at
the 38th apogee, always with no result.

Like all geostationary satellites, Hipparcos was launched in a so
called transfer orbit, that is a highly elliptical orbit with a
perigee of approximately 200 km and an apogee of about 36.000 km. As
the satellite approaches the apogee (the furthest position from the
Earth in the elliptical orbit) its Apogee Boost Motor is ignited in
order to inject the spacecraft into the circular geostationary orbit
at a constant altitude of about 36.000 km. In such an orbit the
satellite moves eastward with a period of 24 hours and from the Earth
it appears fixed in the sky always at the same place so that only one
ground station (Odenwald, near Darmstadt, in the case of Hipparcos) is
enough to control and get data from the satellite.

Attempts to fire the ABM were subsequently abandoned and on 4
September it was decided to terminate the original scientific mission
and to proceed with a "revised mission". The on board hydrazine was
used to raise the perigee of the highly elliptical orbit from 250 km
to 540 km, the apogee remaining at about 36.000 km. The solar arrays
and the fill-in antenna (used to complete the coverage of the main
antenna) were successfully deployed on 12 September. The two telescope
baffles successfully opened on 25 September: stars can be seen
crossing the star mapper grid....

The revised mission, expected to start around mid-October, will allow
a considerable part of the Hipparcos mission to be implemented in
spite of the spacecraft not having reached a geostationary orbit.

In its elliptical orbit, approximately every ten hours, the satellite
goes though the Van Allen Belts. There, at some 5000 km over the
equator, the solar cells are bombarded by a heavy shower of high
energy protons and electrons captured by the solar wind. Under these
circumstances, the solar arrays get easily "damaged" and their
degradation shortens the mission lifetime of the spacecraft: reliable
measurements are not yet available, but it is expected that the
lifetime could be somewhat less than the 30 months originally
foreseen.

The longer the mission the more scientists will be able to get out of
it.  Positions of a large amount of stars (75.000 if the mission lasts
4 months, 110.000 for a revised mission lasting 18 months, against the
120.000 in the original baseline) can still be detected. But with a
mission lasting only 4 months, for instance, each star is observed
only 10 times or less instead of 80, and this means that proper
motions and parallaxes are not estimable and the overall positional
measurement will be probably a factor ten less than expected.
Scientists are confident to achieve a positional accuracy 15 times
higher than that attainable from any ground based observation.
However, for a mission lifetime significantly shorter than the 2.5
years originally foreseen, the degraded precision of the parallaxes
and proper motions would considerably reduce the astrophysical return
of the mission.

Another draw-back to the satellite's performance is related to ground
station coverage. If Hipparcos would have reached its geostationary
orbit, the Odenwald ground station would have been in continuous
contact with the satellite. In its present orbit Hipparcos is instead
viewed by Odenwald for only 30% of the time. For this reason the ESA
ground station in Perth (West Australia) has been equipped with
high-rate data links in order to retrieve scientific data. Data
acquisition time would thus raise to 62%, and if the CNES station in
Kourou is also added to the chain, the coverage would be eventually
brought to about 81%.

Despite the large amount of data which has been downlinked and
analysed, it has not been possible so far to fully understand the
reasons for the Apogee Boost Motor failure.  (The investigations
indicate that the ABM firing orders have been properly executed
on-board. The failure must have occurred downstream the firing relays
either in the electrical or the pyro-technic chain.) An enquiry board
has been formed to investigate the failure. The board will issue a
report on their findings by mid-October 1 989.



--
Neil Dixon <[e-mail]> UUCP:...!mcvax!esatst!neil, BITNET: NDIXON@ESTEC
Thermal Control & Life Support Division (YC)
European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC),
Noordwijk, The Netherlands.

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

Date: 1 Oct 89 20:47:00 GMT
From: sgi!arisia!cdp![e-mail]
Subject: Re: NSS invitations to witness a shuttl


I think you read the questionaire wrong, or you've misunderstood its meaning, the
The NSS offers a shuttle launch tour available to member (for a nominal fee),
it is not a VIP invitation from NASA, but you get to see a launch from a viewing
sight at the cape, if your interested call David Brandt at NSS [phone].

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

Date: 2 Oct 89 23:55:47 GMT
From: [e-mail]  (Bill Ganoe)
Subject: Re: NASA Headline News for 09/27/89 (Forwarded)


The AMROC launch scheduled for last Thursday (28 Sep) was scrubbed
because of bad weather.  As of 13:00 (PDT) today AMROC officials
still hadn't rescheduled the launch and were keeping a wary eye
on storms off the Baja peninsula.

--
> Standard    | William H. Ganoe             sie![e-mail]
  disclaimer <| SIE Dept; Univ. of Arizona; Tucson, AZ 85721; USA
           "We have no gods.  We do business."

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

Date: Mon, 2 Oct 89 20:21:49 PDT
From: Ken Harrenstien <[e-mail]>
Subject: Great Apollo book
Cc: [e-mail]

I'm almost sure that I saw this already mentioned not long ago, but
when I searched back through 2 months of old SPACE digests I couldn't
find a reference, so here's my plug:

Charles Murray & Catherine Bly Cox, "Apollo, the race to the moon"
    (Simon & Schuster, 1989) ISBN 0-671-61101-1

This is the most recent, and one of the best, books I've ever found
about Apollo.  No matter how many other books you've read, if you
haven't seen this, you should.  After sitting here for several minutes
trying to think of how to write a persuasive "review", I gave up...
it's simply a must-read to help understand why Apollo succeeded.
Hint: it is not about astronauts, politicians, or bureaucrats.

--Ken
-------

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

Date: 2 Oct 89 19:11:05 GMT
From: mica.berkeley.edu![e-mail]  (Bill Wisner)
Subject: Re: YAHSS (Yet Another Henry Spencer Signature) or Trump Station

>        And if he did WANT to get involved would the Government
>            let him?

Could the government stop him? Did Ronald Reagan go and claim all orbital
space above the US up to 50,000km as United States territory?

The government could, perhaps, stop Trump from launching a vehicle into
orbit, although they probably wouldn't. But once he gets into orbit he
can pretty much do what he wants, can't he?

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

Date: 2 Oct 89 21:32:20 GMT
From: jumbo![e-mail]  (Bob Ayers)
Subject: Galileo, Protest, Argumentation

Jack Jansen makes some appropriate remarks on the support-reasons for Galileo
and also writes

    This whole attitude of countering opposing groups with non-arguments
    and other crap is *exactly* what got the whole anti-nuke movement
    going. The nuclear industry is finally paying the price for 40 years
    of misinformation and ignoring public sentiment. Let's learn from
    that.

I appreciate this remark and thought the discussion of Be on the shuttle
was beside the point too.  But ...

Maybe you don't know about the Christic Institute.  In fact, they *are*
a bunch of fruitcakes.  They aren't the only group "protesting" the
Galileo launch, but they're the noisiest.

All of the reasoning is already on the side of the scientists. Saying
that the launch is less dangerous than the extra auto traffic due to the
protests doesn't accomplish a thing *because the protesters are not
interested in reasoning about this*.  It's like trying to reason about
evolution with a creationist.

The nuclear industry tried facts. They were and are ineffective.
The opposition doesn't use facts, they use emotions. They counter the
industry (quantitative) claim "Nuclear power is safer than coal" with the
counter-claim "A two-headed calf was born in kansas only ten miles from a
atomic power plant!"

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

Date: 1 Oct 89 20:49:00 GMT
From: sgi!arisia!cdp![e-mail]
Subject: NSS Hotline Update 9/27/89



This is the National Space Society's Space Hotline updated
Wednesday, September 27th.

The House Subcommitte on Space Science and Applications held a
hearing this Tuesday in which NASA Administrator Richard Truly
was questioned about the President's space initiative including
missions to the Moon and Mars.

Truly said that he "believes the option of proceeding directly to
Mars is too ambitious", and that "the Moon is a prudent and
realistic programmatic step on the way to Mars. The red planet,
in Truly's opinion, is "our ultimate target" and we should
eventually settle Mars.

He further argued the importance of the Freedom Space Station and
fielded both questions and lectures from the members of the
subcommittee on NASA's budget. Truly told the panel that he
believed that the Station reconfiguration was necessary to meet
budget cuts promised by the panels' Congressional associates on
the VA, Hud and Independent Agencies Subcommittee.

Truly was scheduled to travel today to the `Education Summit' in
Charlottesville, VA to meet with the President and the nation's
Governors to discuss the education situation. Truly presumably
can make the case for a greater need for engineers and
scientists, as well as help make the tie between high-tech and
economic strength.

"Its too early to assess the full extent of damage to the orbiter
Columbia after an accidental dousing with the fire sprinkler
system in the Orbiter Processing Facility Sunday. The orbiter was
powered up on Tuesday and a damage assessment is underway.
Water did get into some parts of the orbiter, but NASA officials
said that it is too soon to give up on plans for the planned
December 18th launch  of STS-32 to deploy a Syncom IV satellite
and retrieve the LDEF.

Meanwhile the Atlantis continues to undergo launch preparations.
The flight readiness review will be conducted October 2 and 3 at
KSC and at its conclusion a firm launch date will be set. October
12 still seems to be in the works. Stay tuned to the Hotline for
details.

Tomorrow is the scheduled launch of the "Koopman Express". It is
due to lift off at 4:30 pm and we'll have a report on its
progress as soon as its available.

This is David Brandt for the NSS Space Hotline.

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

Date: 2 Oct 89 14:53:54 GMT
From: calvin![e-mail]  (John Sahr)
Subject: Re: Trying to build a fluxgate magnetometer -- help!

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Vaso Bovan) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Mark A. Haun) writes:
>>
>>I would like to measure changes at least as small as
>>10 gammas (.001 Gauss), and if possible, even smaller.
>>
>
>?  You mean of course, nanotesla (nT), since 1954.  :-)

Well, I don't know about the "official" state of "gamma" vs "nT", but
both are in common usage in "the business."  For earth-based mags, the
_only_ unit I have heard used is "gamma".

How many of you circuit dweebs use the "right" term for inverse ohms?
I thought so.

(yearning for the days of furlongs per fortnight :*)

--
John Sahr,     Dept. of Electrical Eng., Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
johns@{alfven,calvin}.ee.cornell.edu,  {rochester,cmcl2}!cornell!calvin!johns
--When the dust settles, each B2 bomber will fund NSF for more than a year--

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

End of SPACE Digest V10 #113
*******************