Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V15_3/V15NO363.TXT

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Date: Sun,  1 Nov 92 05:00:00
From: Space Digest maintainer <[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Subject: Space Digest V15 #363
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Space Digest                Sun,  1 Nov 92       Volume 15 : Issue 363

Today's Topics:
          ANSWER: Recognizing a Dyson sphere if you saw one
                 Automated space station construction
                      Galileo & Ulysses Missions
                How to electronically detect X-RAYS???
                             HRMS for ETI
                Launching Radioactive Waste to the Sun
                    Mars over the Moon??? (2 msgs)
                  NEED HELP FAST! LOOKING F (2 msgs)
                      pocket satellite receivers
                      Query Re: pluto direct/ o
               Scenario of comet hitting Earth (4 msgs)
         Spaceborne Imaging Reveals Unknown Earthquake Faults
              Summer internships at Goddard Space Center
                Swift-Tuttle Comet a threat to earth?
             Two-Line Orbital Element Set:  Space Shuttle
                             UFO mission

    Welcome to the Space Digest!!  Please send your messages to
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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 31 Oct 92 17:22:22 GMT
From: "Frederick A. Ringwald" <[e-mail]>
Subject: ANSWER: Recognizing a Dyson sphere if you saw one
Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.space

My thanks to all who e-mailed me on this thread, here are the results.
A Dyson sphere would probably look like a slowly rotating, old-disk F-K
dwarf (i.e., Sun-like) star with a small IR excess, with the spectrum
of a 300 K blackbody of size on the order of 1 AU.

The central star would probably be detectable: see M. D. Papagiannis,
1985, in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Recent Developments, ed.
M. D. Papagiannis (IAU), p. 268, for a calculation of stress and
material requirements on a Dyson sphere. To summarize, all the material
in the Solar System, aside from the Sun, comes to about 500 Earth
masses. Of this, only about 10 Earth masses would be useful as
structural material (helium and argon would not), although I add that
one might obtain more by making plastic with HCON from the gas giants.
Still, even if one could use all 500 Earth masses to make a Dyson
sphere of radius 10^13 cm, about at the orbit of Venus, it would be at
most 5-10 m thick, about the equivalent of a shell of 1 m radius and
the thickness of a single atom. To avoid buckling in the Sun's
gravitational field, equivalent to a uniform external pressure, it
would have to be made of material about 10^10 times stiffer than any
known material. Big advances in materials science happen when you
improve things by a factor of 2; a factor of 10 is fantastic. A factor
of 10^10 doesn't look promising...

Don't harangue me until you've worked this calculation out for
yourself. I have not explored the interesting idea of siphoning matter
off the Sun and making plastic with it, to make a Dyson sphere of small
radius (since if you take a lot of matter off the Sun, it becomes less
luminous, but then again, less massive and stress-inducing, and more
long-lived): I leave that up to you.

But make the shell smaller, and the stress gets worse; make it larger,
and one runs out of material. So it may be fundamentally impossible to
make a single, solid shell of a Dyson sphere, a Dyson sphere in the
strictest sense. But of course, this does not preclude a swarm of
independent structures, such as O'Neill colonies.

Which brings us back to my original question: whether or not one can
detect the central star, how does one tell a Dyson sphere from a
quite-natural circumstellar dust shell? Both would look like 300 K
blackbodies, of radius on the order of 1 AU. Even if the central star
were not detectable, a dense, dusty circumstellar shell might be able
to do this: Herbig-Haro objects come to mind. High-resolution imaging
may not be helpful, as either artificial or natural objects might look
like rings, shells, or spheres. High-resolution spectra may not be too
helpful, either: Marsh & Mahoney (1992, BAAS, 24, 1076) interpret gaps
in the IR continua of T Tauri stars as gaps in temperature, and
therefore as gaps in the circumstellar disks, likely places for planets
to be forming. A very interesting discovery, but not what I had in
mind.

Of course, finding narrow-band radio signals (or laser signals, or
other avenues for SETI) would be a giveaway. This is why I was pleased
when Jill Tarter e-mailed to say that Dana Backman gave her group a
list of IR-excess stars they will eventually put on the target list.
She also says the search is going well; no, they have not detected ETI
yet, and yes, the search will be more efficient once they "teach the
new instrument to be smart enough. Until then, it's hard work."

She mentioned that she and Kardashev got an hour on the VLA to check
out a source, but it turned out to be an OH/IR star. I was also
wondering about what searches for IR-excess stars have been done with
SETI in mind, and she told me about:

Slysh, V. I. 1985,in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Recent
Developments, ed. M. D. Papagiannis (IAU), p. 315
He points out that the IRAS database might be able to see solid-shell
Dyson spheres up to 1 kpc away. By the way, you won't get a SIRTF
proposal accepted without target coordinates: searching the IRAS
database for candidate objects is essential. There was plenty of other
good stuff in this volume, I highly recommend it.

Joe Lazio kindly provided me with the reference:

Jugaku, J., and Nishimura, S. 1991, in Bioastronomy, eds. J. Heidman &
M.J. Klein (Berlin: Springer-Verlag), p. 295
They did a small search, of 54 stars, but again, I'm not sure of their
claim that they can differentiate between Dyson spheres and dust shells
of the same temperature: they were too vague about it.

So far, it appears there has been no large-scale search for
circumstellar dust shells coinciding in position with F-K stars, say,
by an automated comparison of the IRAS and SAO catalogs. What makes it
even more interesting is that it appears to be a way of doing SETI
without the dreaded "giggle factor": this project could be
scientifically justified entirely as a circumstellar matter project.
One need not even mention SETI in the proposal!

Fred Ringwald
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755-3528 U.S.A.
and I am well aware that my name sounds like Ringworld, thank you.

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

Date: 1 Nov 92 00:19:55 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: Automated space station construction
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (I am a terminator.) writes:
>Can robots be launched to build the space station?

Robotics technology is nowhere near building robots capable of such things.
--
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

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

Date: 31 Oct 92 16:05:21 GMT
From: Michel Dignard <[e-mail]>
Subject: Galileo & Ulysses Missions
Newsgroups: sci.space

Could someone please remind me what are the respective missions of
Galileo and Ulysses spacecrafts.

I know much about Galileo HGA problem, but not so much about its
Mission :-)

From a recent "Galileo Update", I infer that it is the one intended
for solar (polar?) orbit, and it has something to do with Jupiter
(gravitational "swing"?)

So, I would like some details about those two :
trajectories, relation to Ecliptic, ...

--
Michel Dignard, Universite de Montreal.

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

Date: 31 Oct 92 17:09:35 GMT
From: Charles Thompson <[e-mail]>
Subject: How to electronically detect X-RAYS???
Newsgroups: sci.electronics,sci.space,sci.space.shuttle,sci.physics

I am looking for a sensitive X-ray detector.
What is the best way to detect X-rays?
What do the space probes use to detect X-rays?
Are scintillation/photodiode techniques used?

I need a large array of X-ray detectors and I
can't afford a photomultiplier tube for each one.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.


-Charlie Thompson

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

Date: 1 Nov 92 00:29:32 GMT
From: "J. Lewis" <[e-mail]>
Subject: HRMS for ETI
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.bio

An earlier poster has written
>
> Au contraire!  Our ignorance about origin of life is profound, and
> very little progress has been made in dispelling it.  There is no
> really plausible model for the origin of life.  We're missing at least
> one, and possibly several, fundamental ideas.

It may have been pointed out earlier, in which case my apologies, but the
early emergence of prokaryotes can be construed as weak evidence that
their development was straightforward.  The relatively late emergence of
eukaryotic cells is weak evidence that this is difficult, with events of low
probability being required.  So little is known of this latter evolutionary
step that there is not even much speculation about it.

The evolution of multicellular organisms with complex internal structure
from simple eukaryotes appears to be straightforward.  Something can be
said about which of the resulting basic body-forms might eventually evolve
to support cognition - is an intelligent lobster possible, for instance?
The probability that body-forms which can so evolve will survive is
extremely difficult to estimate, and could well be minuscule, as S.J. Gould
and the debate about his book "Wonderful Life" has shown.

All in all, IMHO, it is not our knowledge but our ignorance that justifies
a modest SETI.  The most optimistic "reasonable" estimate of the factors
in the Drake equation leads to the conclusion that detectable
ET civilisations should be common in our galaxy; the most pessimistic
"reasonable" estimate suggests that ETI may occur in only a minute
fraction of the galaxies in the Universe.  As the laws of nature are the
same everywhere, it is prudent to look and listen about us.

My apologies if these points have been discussed previously.

John Lewis
Physics
Memorial University of Nfld.

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

Date: 1 Nov 92 00:43:51 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: Launching Radioactive Waste to the Sun
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Hoffman Eric J.SDO 5186 ) writes:
>...the relative launch energy costs of--
>
>    a) direct ascent from Earth to Sun
>    b) into Sun via inner planet gravity assist
>    c) into Sun via outer planet gravity assist
>    d) direct ascent to Moon
>    e) direct ascent to Venus
>    f) into solar system escape trajectory?

Actually, the crucial issue is cost, not energy.  It's not *that* expensive
to just put the stuff into a hole in the ground, even if it's a hole designed
by DoE.  Being cost-competitive requires minimizing cost per kilogram.  The
cheap launch systems like laser launchers and electromagnetic catapults tend
to prefer lots of small packages over a few big ones.  The result is a very
strong cost preference for systems that do *not* require the individual
packages to carry navigation and propulsion systems, especially highly
reliable ones.  Those systems are damned expensive.

This rules out gravity assists and direct hits on planets.  The planets
themselves are tiny, and the gravity-assist aiming windows smaller yet.
To hit them, you really need precision tracking and course corrections.

The one marginal exception might be the Moon, since it's pretty close.
Hitting it with dumb packages might be feasible, especially with a launch
system like a laser launcher that can deliver thrust after the package
leaves the atmosphere (i.e. can correct for atmospheric effects on the
trajectory).  It would help if you're not too fussy about where on the
Moon the stuff ends up... but the Moon is too useful to turn more than
a small part of it into a trash dump.

The two targets you can hit without precision navigation are the Sun and
escape velocity.  The Sun is big and its gravitational field gets you a
lot of free focusing of trajectories.  And solar escape velocity is solar
escape velocity, regardless of exact direction.  Here the tradeoff is
quite simple:  escape velocity is sqrt(2) times circular velocity, so
to get a package into the Sun, we need to kill nearly all of Earth's
30 km/s circular velocity, while to get it to escape, we need only add
another 12 km/s or so.
--
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

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

Date: 31 Oct 92 11:18:12 CST
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Mars over the Moon???
Newsgroups: sci.space

Gentelmen......      (and Ladys)

   I have run across much speculation lately pertaining to the teraforming of
Mars.
   While I find this fascinating I was wondering why the respective space
programs have chosen to abandon the Moon? I realise that it's just a hunk of
rock but wouldn't it prove a more logical choice for a permant staging aera at
the very least? Also I see no reason why many of the techniques that have been
sugested for attempted teraforming couldn't be tested on a smaller scale on the
Moon.
   I would appreciate it if anyone out there who is better informed than I
(which is not a hard thing to be) would take a few moments to clear this up for
me.
                                           Many Thanks....

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

Date: 1 Nov 92 00:52:16 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: Mars over the Moon???
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>   ... I was wondering why the respective space
>programs have chosen to abandon the Moon? ...

This decision is basically irrational and political.  It can't be justified
on rational grounds unless you assume that the next big program, whatever
it is, will be another one-shot-and-that's-all effort... in which case it
makes sense to go somewhere we haven't already been.  Any rational plan for
an ongoing space program will include resuming lunar exploration, which
barely got started in the Apollo era.

>... Also I see no reason why many of the techniques that have been
>sugested for attempted teraforming couldn't be tested on a smaller scale
>on the Moon.

Unfortunately, there is a fundamental reason, actually a couple of them:
no atmosphere, and no source of volatiles to create one.  Mars does have
an existing atmosphere, thin though it is, and definitely has some --
perhaps a lot of -- frozen volatiles that could thicken it.  The Moon
definitely has neither, not in terraforming-relevant quantities anyway.
--
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

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

Date: 30 Oct 92 19:11:00 GMT
From: Bill Nunnelee <[e-mail]>
Subject: NEED HELP FAST! LOOKING F
Newsgroups: sci.space

-> What are the Leonids?
-> What did the Leonids do in 1799 and 1833 that was spectacular?

This is a meteor shower that reaches peak activity around November 16th
each year.  Normally, the numbers are fairly low, but once every 33
years (the period of the parent comet), very spectacular displays
can occur.  Obviously, there is a concentration of cometary debris at
one point along the orbit.  The shower (or perhaps "storm" would be more
appropriate) was especially heavy in 1833 and 1866, when as many as
20,000 meteors could be seen within a few hours.  (I'm not sure about
1799, but the timing would be about right.  One of these displays
served as the inspiration for the song "Stars Fell on Alabama.")  The
last really good Leonid shower occurred in 1966.


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

Date: 1 Nov 92 00:28:32 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: NEED HELP FAST! LOOKING F
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Bill Nunnelee)  writes:
>-> What are the Leonids?
>
>This is a meteor shower that reaches peak activity around November 16th
>each year.  Normally, the numbers are fairly low, but once every 33
>years (the period of the parent comet), very spectacular displays
>can occur...

Note "can", not "will".  The impressive 1966 shower caught a lot of
people by surprise, because the 1933 and 1900 peaks were nothing much
and it was widely thought that the Leonids were dying out.
--
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

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

Date: 1 Nov 92 00:17:44 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: pocket satellite receivers
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Leigh Palmer) writes:
>Incidentally, I have heard that full available (to the US military)
>precision can be deduced from data collected by these civilian devices if
>one integrates over long time periods. The numbers do seem to jump *around*
>the correct value, as I've observed in my backyard with one of these units,
>owned by a friend. I've never done the integration. Can anyone provide
>information about this rumor?

The noise being injected by DoD (the buzzphrase is selective availability)
is currently of a relatively simple type that can indeed be removed by
long-term averaging.  The geologists do this all the time; GPS is coming
in very handy indeed for geodetic work and studies of fault motion etc.,
where accuracy of a few centimeters is highly desirable.

The satellites and the ground stations *are* capable of introducing more
obnoxious forms of noise, which can't be averaged out.
--
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

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

Date: 31 Oct 92 15:57:10 GMT
From: Del Cotter <[e-mail]>
Subject: Query Re: pluto direct/ o
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> Ian Taylor writes:
>While I'm here, anyone know if a gravity assist trajectory can be used to
>*reduce* speed?

NASA had a proposal to launch a solar probe (Starprobe) at Jupiter which
would have put it into an orbit of (if memory serves) 0.25AU perihelion and
a period of 4.5 years.  Whether that counts as a *slowdown* though...

    ...but officer, I was only doing 80km a second...
                     ^^
Then there's Ulysses, whose speed was unchanged, merely(!) redirected by
90 degrees.

You can get to Mercury cheaper by slowing via Venus, I think, then there
was a scare a few (seems a million) years ago about a dastardly Russian
plan to send a satkiller into *retrograde* Clarke orbit via the Moon.

There's no end to the fun you can have playing interplanetary snooker; I
think the fundamental limit for any single encounter (confirmation, please?)
is the vector sum of spacecraft and accelerating body beforehand.

--
 ',' ' ',','  |                                                  |  ',' ' ',','
   ', ,','    |       Del Cotter       [e-mail]      |    ', ,','
     ','      |                                                  |      ','

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

Date: Sat, 31 Oct 92 08:40:06 GMT
From: Cameron Newham <[e-mail]>
Subject: Scenario of comet hitting Earth
Newsgroups: sci.space

So, we nuke the comet which in turn would cause lots of radioactive
debris to fall to earth over a large area.

Besides - nuclear explosions in space are currently banned.

Anyway, all this talk of nuking comets is fine (if it works).  What about
asteroids?  They present a rather more difficult problem.

-cameron.

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

Date: 31 Oct 92 20:36:51 GMT
From: Joe Wang <[e-mail]>
Subject: Scenario of comet hitting Earth
Newsgroups: alt.sci.planetary,sci.astro,sci.space,talk.origins

About two decades ago, an MIT undergraduate aero/astro project lab was
given the follow problem as a term project.

  The asteroid Icarus will hit the earth in two years.  Do something
  about it.

The final design report of the class was turned into a book _Project
Icarus_ (published by the MIT press I think) which makes for
interesting reading.  Basically, their plan was to use a few nuclear
tipped Saturn V's and nudge Icarus so that it would miss the earth,
and the design report goes into considerable detail on the components
that would be needed.

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

Date: 31 Oct 92 20:36:06 GMT
From: Patrick Chester <[e-mail]>
Subject: Scenario of comet hitting Earth
Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>Just because a nuclear explosion could 'destroy' a comet, does not
>mean that the material making up the comet would thereby _disappear_
>(conservation of matter), nor would the rubble necessarily not
>continue on the same trajectory as it did before being nuked (conservation
>of momentum and energy).  A pile of debris hitting the earth at 60 km/sec
>could make a mess just as surely (if not as effectively) as an intact comet.

Questions:Would it be possible for most of the resulting fragments to be too
small to survive passage through atmosphere, even at velocities of 60 km/sec?
Would not this reduce the amount of matter pounding the surface and reduce
the overall damage inflicted? Would having one huge ball of various ices
hitting the Earth at 60km/sec be much worse than a few thousand tiny chunks of
ices doing the same? Especially if most of those smaller pieces didn't make it
past the atmosphere?

You are right to point out that most of the mass would still be there but I
think it would be a better situation to have a bunch of rubble heading towards
Earth than a huge mas of ices. Of course, it would be better still to use the
nukes or thrusters to push the comet out of the way than to blow it to bits.

>(This is one of the SDI falacies of 'shooting down' ballistic missles.
>They be coming down no matter what.  Like the SCUDs - hitting a missle
>ain't enough.)

I would think that chunks of ICBM parts hitting the ground is far better than
having a fully armed and working nuclear warhead going off in an airburst over
your cities. When looking at such criteria, 'shooting down' ballistic missiles
is more than enough.

>What we have to do is ensure the orbit is a safe one - don't matter if
>it's broken apart, just so it misses.  And a small, steady thrust over
>a long period of time could be just as effective, if not as spectacular,
>as a last-minute explosion.

Might try hitting it with a laser on one side and let the vaporized parts push
it away as it boils off into space.



--
Patrick Chester            |----------------------------------------------------
[e-mail] |"The earth is too fragile a basket in which to keep
Politically Incorrect      |  all your eggs." Robert A. Heinlein
Future Lunar Colonist      |"The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us
#^%$!! Militarist          |  are going to the stars." Anonymous
(Of the Sun Tzu mentality) |----------------------------------------------------

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

Date: 1 Nov 92 00:26:09 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: Scenario of comet hitting Earth
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>So, we nuke the comet which in turn would cause lots of radioactive
>debris to fall to earth over a large area.

Why do you assume that the debris will hit Earth?

Even if it does, it's not going to be much worse than a few atmospheric
H-bomb tests, of the sort that was common in the 1950s.

>Besides - nuclear explosions in space are currently banned.

The treaty in question explicitly provides for negotiated exceptions for
peaceful applications.

>Anyway, all this talk of nuking comets is fine (if it works).  What about
>asteroids?  They present a rather more difficult problem.

No, only a slightly more difficult one.  They don't provide natural reaction
mass like the comets do.  (I assume we're talking about asteroids which are
not extinct comet nuclei; some probably are.)  But you can still move them
by supplying adequate energy.  Nuclear bombs are a fairly effective way of
supplying lots of energy.  Project Icarus at MIT estimated that a few 100MT
bombs offered a very high probability of successfully diverting Icarus, a
pretty large asteroid (as Earth-approachers go), on quite short notice.
--
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

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

Date: 31 Oct 92 19:05:51 GMT
From: Steve Flaherty <[e-mail]>
Subject: Spaceborne Imaging Reveals Unknown Earthquake Faults
Newsgroups: sci.space

[e-mail] (Ron Baalke) writes:

>NASA SPACEBORNE IMAGING REVEALS UNKNOWN EARTHQUAKE FAULTS

>     Geologists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif.,
>and Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, have discovered several previously
>unknown earthquake faults in California's northeastern Mojave Desert by
>analyzing remote sensing images at optical, infrared and radar wavelengths.

>     In a paper presented today at the annual meeting of the Geological Society
>of America in Cincinnati, JPL's Dr. John Ford outlined how spaceborne imaging
>technology has helped scientists find these newly observed faults, many of
>which are located within Fort Irwin, Calif., an active military training area.

Of possible interest to sci.space readers is the fact that the Goldstone DSN
complex lies within Fort Irwin (Army tank drivers looking for a smoother ride
frequently wreak havok on the roads).

Steve Flaherty   (ex-JPL'er)

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|                              | [phone] Fax       |                   |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Date: 31 Oct 92 17:34:00 GMT
From: ZORBA THE GEEK <[e-mail]>
Subject: Summer internships at Goddard Space Center
Newsgroups: sci.space

Hi. I heard that there was an inter program at Goddard space center that dealt
with atmospheric physics. Does anyone know if this is true? I am specifically
looking for an address and a contact to write to to find out more about the
program. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Mark Wieczorek

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

Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 13:48:57 GMT
From: Holger Stegemann <[e-mail]>
Subject: Swift-Tuttle Comet a threat to earth?
Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.space

[e-mail] (Steinn Sigurdsson) writes:

>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Thorsten Altenkirch) writes:


>   I understand that it is pretty unlikely that Swift-Tuttle will hit
>   earth in 2126. However, I would like to know what would happen in the
>   case such a big object would collide with our planet? I am not sure

>You die, I die, Everybody dies!

Calm down. Do you expect to live until 2126? OK.

IF the comet will really hit the earth (and it's not sure it does),
we and the next generations have about 120 years to think it over. Maybe
we can put some science fiction into reality and build an
"anti-comet-weapon".

Holger
--
This signature intentionally left free.

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

Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1992 16:36:00 GMT
From: TS Kelso <[e-mail]>
Subject: Two-Line Orbital Element Set:  Space Shuttle
Newsgroups: sci.space

The most current orbital elements from the NORAD two-line element sets are
carried on the Celestial BBS, [phone], and are updated daily (when
possible).  Documentation and tracking software are also available on this
system.  As a service to the satellite user community, the most current
elements for the current shuttle mission are provided below.  The Celestial
BBS may be accessed 24 hours/day at 300, 1200, 2400, 4800, or 9600 bps using
8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity.

Element sets (also updated daily), shuttle elements, and some documentation
and software are also available via anonymous ftp from archive.afit.af.mil
(129.92.1.66) in the directory pub/space.

STS 52
1 22194U 92 70  A 92303.91666666  .00104203  00000-0  25599-3 0   229
2 22194  28.4634  66.5854 0006855 357.8653  80.4837 15.94513292  1150
--
Dr TS Kelso                           Assistant Professor of Space Operations
[e-mail]                    Air Force Institute of Technology

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

Date: 31 Oct 92 02:39:54 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: UFO mission
Newsgroups: sci.space

Hi Rod,

>I know how you guys hate posting this sort of thing over here & I
>normally refrain, but I have not been able to get any information
>on this in A.A.V. Please help me out if you are able.

>> brief glimpse, there was a shot of a computer screen after they
>>had logged into Wright Patterson AFB, and the subject on the
>>screen said something to the effect of "Catalogue of UFO parts
>>list"!!

>>>I will ask again, has anyone heard about the UFO Atlas launch?

   I'd guess that you're looking at data on the US Department of
Defense UFO program.  That's the UHF Follow-On Satellite program
(called UFO).  It's a US Navy fleet communications satellite program
to replace some aging communications satellites that operate in the
"Ultra High Frequency" range of 30 GHz or so.
   It's being built by Hughes (I vaguely know the program manager at
Hughes)and is planned for a near-term Atlas launch, sot that Atlas
launch date is not surprizing.  Although I thought there were
several in the series, and there should also be at least another
planned Atlas launch on the manifest over the next year or so
following the one listed.
   Considering that USAF Systems Command is launching it, and Wright
Patterson AFB is home to part of USAF Systems Command, it certainly
is possible that someone could find a parts list for part of the
satellite program (or at least an experiement or module on the
satellite).

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 Wales Larrison                         Space Technology Investor

--- Maximus 2.00

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End of Space Digest Volume 15 : Issue 363
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