Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V15_3/V15NO312.TXT

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Date: Tue, 13 Oct 92 05:06:04
From: Space Digest maintainer <[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Subject: Space Digest V15 #312
To: Space Digest Readers
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Space Digest                Tue, 13 Oct 92       Volume 15 : Issue 312

Today's Topics:
  All systems are what? (was Re: Mars Observer Update #2 - 10/07/92)
                   Bootstrap hardware for LunaBase
                          lunar advertising
  Lunar advertising, eyeball resolution (was Re: Laser Space Mirror)
                   Mars Observer Update - 10/12/92
 Mass driver/railgun literature (was Re: Transportation on the Moon.)
               NASA Daily News for 10/02/92 (Forwarded)
             WE ARE STILL HERE: THE 500 YEARS CELEBRATION
                        X-Ray Maps of Earth ?

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Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 03:10:13 GMT
From: Greg Moore <[e-mail]>
Subject: All systems are what? (was Re: Mars Observer Update #2 - 10/07/92)
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Steve Collins) writes:
>
>
>stuff like : "AACS is GO except for the high gyro temp". In a way this
>is tradition from the early space program, but the formality of the
>language serves to clarify communications on the net. Saying "Nine-er"
>helps to distinguish "Five" from "Nine".

    Actually this is a result of english being the language of
international aviation.  Nine sounds exactly like nein of German.

For the most part, the
>com nets are pretty clear, but people do have problems with headsets and
>interference. I had the pleasure of being "on the console" during launch
>         but that's a different story,
>              Steve Collins
>              Mars Observer Spacecraft Team (AACS)

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

Date: 13 Oct 92 02:58:16 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: Bootstrap hardware for LunaBase
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>> Probably no more than $8 billion even with the modifications
>required
>> for surface use.
>
>I don't entirely disagree with your numbers, but this statement is
>financial nonsense (no offense). You amortize R&D costs over some
>number of units...   You don't write it off in one
>lump sum against the first unit of production.

Except that it *is* being written off in one lump sum against the first
unit of production, because nobody can be sure there'll ever be another.
It is fair, legitimate, and correct to say that the incremental cost of
building another is, say, $8G.  Whether some fraction of development
cost should also be assigned to the second user is a political issue,
not a financial one, given that the development is being funded on the
basis of a production run of 0001.

Given that Fred survived its funding battles at least partly because
the development funding is seen as a bone tossed to a starving aerospace
industry, talking about amortization is silly.  This *isn't* a commercial
project, justified solely on the bottom line.
--
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

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

Date: 12 Oct 92 22:29:20 GMT
From: Andrew Haveland-Robinson <[e-mail]>
Subject: lunar advertising
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:

>
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Andrew> Haveland-Robinson) writes:
>>>I've heard of a proposal to "paint" the Coke logo on the Moon. Using a
>>>highly reflective "dust", say titanium dioxide smoke particles, sputtered
>>>onto the surface by an electron beam from a lunar orbiting satellite.
>>>The layer could be molecules thick...
>>
>>Argghh!!  Conceptually brilliant - the ultimate graffito!
>
>Old idea, actually.  Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon" included a
>similar concept nearly half a century ago.  And did it with a bit more
>sophistication, too:  the Coke logo wouldn't be legible to the naked eye,
>it's too complex... but "7UP" would be... so how much would Coke pay
>to buy up the advertising concession in perpetuity to ensure it is
>never used...?
>--

Hi again Henry... I'm sure it wasn't original, just that the conceptually
brilliant bit is doing the "printing" - I'm sure the "coke" logo would be
visible, just that some distortion would have to be applied to cope with
the curvature of the moon's surface...

"Oh damn, anyone got an eraser?" :-)

Cheers,
Andy.

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Press On.
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistance.
  Talent will not;
    nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.
  Genuis will not;
    unrewarded genuis is almost a proverb.
  Education alone will not;
    the world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistance and determination alone are omnipotent.

ANON

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

Date: 13 Oct 92 05:02:09 GMT
From: Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey <[e-mail]>
Subject: Lunar advertising, eyeball resolution (was Re: Laser Space Mirror)
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Gary Coffman) writes:
> In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Andrew Haveland-Robinson) writes:
>>
>>Why not laser raster scan the clouds with MacDonalds adverts?   >cringe<
>
> I've heard of a proposal to "paint" the Coke logo on the Moon. Using a
> highly reflective "dust", say titanium dioxide smoke particles, sputtered
> onto the surface by an electron beam from a lunar orbiting satellite.
> The layer could be molecules thick [...]

Gary, this isn't clear.  How would "an electron beam" sputter
"titanium dioxide smoke particles" onto the surface?

The last time this thread came up, more than a year ago, I began to
wonder just how much you could write on the lunar surface that would
be visible from the Earth.  I never got around to writing it up, and
my copy of McCormick's *Human Factors Engineering* is in another
building right now.  But the Moon is pretty small, only half a degree
across, and your eye has only a limited angular resolution (a number
that varies according to the contrast with the background, one thing
that makes the calculation tricky).

For example, Mare Crisium, over on the eastern edge, on my right in
the Northern Hemisphere, is pretty hard to make out as a separate
object with the naked eye.

Even with very good contrast (like 90% albedo stuff painted on the 5%
albedo Moon), you probably couldn't fit more than one or two dozen
"pixels" across the Moon.  So much for the Coca-Cola logo.

If we relax the requirements, and say that the advertising must be
readable with 7-power binoculars, we can do much more.

By the way, Heinlein's *The Man Who Sold the Moon* isn't the only
place where this idea appears.  In one of the stories in *The Other
Side of the Sky*, Arthur Clarke suggests that releasing sodium vapor
from the surface could cause a glow in the lunar "atmosphere" that
could be observed from the Earth temporarily-- rather like sounding
rockets or the CRRES satellite occasionally do for this planet.  One
of the astronauts inserts a stencil in the sodium-vapor nozzle, and
the Coke logo floats across the Moon for all the world to see...

     O~~*           /_) ' / /   /_/ '  ,   ,  ' ,_  _           \|/
   - ~ -~~~~~~~~~~~/_) / / /   / / / (_) (_) / / / _\~~~~~~~~~~~zap!
 /       \                          (_) (_)                    / | \
 |       |     Bill Higgins   Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
 \       /     Bitnet:     [e-mail]
   -   -       Internet:  [e-mail]
     ~         SPAN/Hepnet:      43011::HIGGINS

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

Date: 13 Oct 92 11:49:23 GMT
From: Ron Baalke <[e-mail]>
Subject: Mars Observer Update - 10/12/92
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.astro,alt.sci.planetary

Forwarded from:
PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE [phone]

                  MARS OBSERVER MISSION STATUS
                        October 12, 1992

     The Mars Observer spacecraft successfully completed its
first trajectory correction maneuver (TCM-1) at 3:02 p.m. Pacific
Daylight Time on Oct. 10.  The maneuver changed the spacecraft's
velocity by 50 meters per second (164 feet per second), thereby
slightly altering its interplanetary course to Mars.  The burn
lasted two minutes and 13 seconds.  The spacecraft was returned
to normal cruise mode, called the "array normal spin,"
thereafter.

     The next trajectory correction maneuver, TCM-2, is scheduled
for Jan. 8, 1993.

     All spacecraft systems are operating normally.  Today the
spacecraft is about 5 million kilometers (3.2 million miles) from
Earth, traveling at a speed of about 10,800 kilometers per hour
(7,500 miles per hour) with respect to Earth.  The spacecraft is
traveling at a heliocentric velocity of about 119,000 kilometers
per hour (74,000 miles per hour).

                             #####
     ___    _____     ___
    /_ /|  /____/ \  /_ /|     Ron Baalke         | [e-mail]
    | | | |  __ \ /| | | |     Jet Propulsion Lab |
 ___| | | | |__) |/  | | |__   M/S 525-3684 Telos | Einstein's brain is stored
/___| | | |  ___/    | |/__ /| Pasadena, CA 91109 | in a mason jar in a lab
|_____|/  |_|/       |_____|/                     | in Wichita, Kansas.

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

Date: 13 Oct 92 00:14:07 -0600
From: Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey <[e-mail]>
Subject: Mass driver/railgun literature (was Re: Transportation on the Moon.)
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Rajesh Batra) writes:
> We have been given a Senior Design Project based on a fictious
> premise that ice has been found at the North Pole of the Moon.  Our moon base
> (it's the year 2016, by the way) is located at the equator. Our Mission is
> to bring back this ice from the North Pole to our production facility plants
> (located at the equator as well) for extraction of Hydrogen and Oxygen.
> [...] We have come up with several ideas including Pipelines,
> Rockets, and Rail Guns. We are delivering about 2 tons of rock (containing ice)
> a day.
>
> If anyone can direct me to abstracts that have been written concerning
> Rail Guns please do not hesitate to email me.

[I e-mailed Rajesh, but it seems this might be of interest to others, too.]

Interesting design problem.  Offhand, it seems wrong to drag the ice
to the equator and do the processing there, but if that's your
assignment...

(Also, if you have the infrastructure to build a railgun launcher and
associated power supply, logistics, operations and maintenance stuff
at the poles, you can probably afford to build your chemical
engineering plant there instead!  Then you can ship anything you want
anywhere on the Moon or beyond, using the same H2-O2 rockets you use
to supply your base, refueling them at the Pole. Solar cells or
mirrors on a tall tower can give you power 28 days around the clock
there, too.)

Hope Cincinatti has some good engineering libraries;  if not, talk to
your librarian about the Magic of Interlibrary Loan.  And get a roll
or two of dimes for the photocopier.

Start with Arthur C. Clarke, "Electromagnetic Launching as a Major
Contribution to Spaceflight," *Journal of the British Interplanetary
Society*, v. 9 n. 6, November 1950, p. 261-267.  Unless you want to
start with an extremely obscure 1937 science fiction novel called
*Zero to Eighty* by Akkad Pseudoman, a pseudonym (Oh, no kidding.) for
E.F. Northrup.

Generally speaking, the best places to look for information are the
"Princeton Conferences,"  with titles like *Proceedings of the Nth
Conference on Space Manufacturing*, published by the AIAA.

I have the title of only one of them explicitly: *Space Manufacturing
5: Engineering with Lunar and Asteroidal Materials*, edited by Barbara
Faughnan and Gregg Maryniak, AIAA (1985).

Also, every couple of years, there is a big conference on
electromagnetic launcher technology, and it appears in *IEEE
Transactions on Magnetics* as an extra-thick issue.  For instance,
IEEE T on M, V.27, No. 1, January 1991.

I have some specific early references (I met Henry Kolm in 1979 and he
sent me a bunch of papers).

Kolm, H., "An electromagnetic `slingshot' for space propulsion,"
*Technology Review*, Jun 1977, p. 61-66.
Good semi-technical overview.

Kolm, H., Mongeau, P., "An alternative launching medium," *IEEE
Spectrum*, April 1982, p. 30-36.

A bunch of papers in the first two Princeton Conference on Space
Manufacturing (1977 and 1979) by Kolm, Kevin Fine, Peter Mongeau, and
Fred Williams.

Looking at my records, the Princeton conferences have so much stuff on
this it's not worth typing the titles individually.

     O~~*           /_) ' / /   /_/ '  ,   ,  ' ,_  _           \|/
   - ~ -~~~~~~~~~~~/_) / / /   / / / (_) (_) / / / _\~~~~~~~~~~~zap!
 /       \                          (_) (_)                    / | \
 |       |     Bill Higgins   Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
 \       /     Bitnet:     [e-mail]
   -   -       Internet:  [e-mail]
     ~         SPAN/Hepnet:      43011::HIGGINS

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

Date: 12 Oct 92 18:47:48 -0600
From: Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey <[e-mail]>
Subject: NASA Daily News for 10/02/92 (Forwarded)
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Michael Wallis) writes:
> [e-mail] (david michelson) writes:
>
>> Just a correction or two:
[list of mistakes deleted]
>
> Sounds like another typical NASA press release.
>
> * sigh *

Not fair, Mike.  Whatever other criticism they may be open to, NASA
press releases are usually quite accurate.  Furthermore, Mr. Redmond
posted a public apology last week for the mistakes that crept into
"NASA Daily News."  Want to keep beating a dead horse?

> PLAN:   Live fast, die young, leave a neat corpse.
>         Oh ... I'm too old to die young?     Rats!


I've got my doubts about the corpse, too. (-:

     O~~*           /_) ' / /   /_/ '  ,   ,  ' ,_  _           \|/
   - ~ -~~~~~~~~~~~/_) / / /   / / / (_) (_) / / / _\~~~~~~~~~~~zap!
 /       \                          (_) (_)                    / | \
 |       |     Bill Higgins   Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
 \       /     Bitnet:     [e-mail]
   -   -       Internet:  [e-mail]
     ~         SPAN/Hepnet:      43011::HIGGINS

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

Date: 12 Oct 92 21:16:53 GMT
From: Curtis Roelle <roelle@uars_mag.jhuapl.edu>
Subject: WE ARE STILL HERE: THE 500 YEARS CELEBRATION
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d,sci.space

[e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:

>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Patrick Chester) writes:
>>>includes a race to Mars between three solar)powered spaceships
>>          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>>named after Columbus' Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria; a "Tall
>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>WHOA!! What the hell are you talking about here? I tend to follow the space
>>program very closely and I have not heard of this...

>It's not mistaken, just out of date.  The Columbus Cup solar-sail race was
>originally going to launch this year.  Funding problems -- aggravated by
>the untimely arrival of a recession -- scuttled that schedule, and perhaps
>the entire race.  (Some of the would-be entrants are still interested, but
>as far as I know, nothing much is happening lately.  Certainly the Canadian
>Solar Sail Project [which started as a race entry] is on hold until the
>money situation improves.)

Reminds one of the once-proposed French space-ring, intended to be a
mindless non-functioning street-light-in-the-sky.  The plan was to
launch the silly thing (it was the winner of some sort of art contest)
into LEO to celebrate the Nth anniversary of the Eiffel Tower.  The
intensity of reflected sunlight was expected to be similar to full
moon.  Fortunately, and to the delight of astronomers, level heads
prevailed and the idea was nixed.

Curt Roelle

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

Date: 11 Oct 92 23:59:00 GMT
From: Max Breunig <[e-mail]>
Subject: X-Ray Maps of Earth ?
Newsgroups: sci.space

From: UUCP/Sci/Astro
>Betrifft         : X-ray map of N. California
>Erstellungsdatum : 07.10.92 18:08
>
>From: [e-mail]
>Message-Id: [e-mail]
>Organization: Lockheed Missiles & Space Company, Inc.
>
>I am searching for an X-ray map of Northern California to
>reveal caves and caverns underground.  Know of any sources?
>

Sounds interesting !
I have never heard of any X-ray maping of earth.
Knows anyone of such a project and some details on it ?


Max Breunig                  [e-mail]


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End of Space Digest Volume 15 : Issue 312
------------------------------