Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT_ZIP/spacedig/V16_3/V16NO308.ZIP/V16NO308

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Date: Sat, 13 Mar 93 05:21:27
From: Space Digest maintainer <[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Subject: Space Digest V16 #308
To: Space Digest Readers
Precedence: bulk


Space Digest                Sat, 13 Mar 93       Volume 16 : Issue 308

Today's Topics:
                        Alignment of planets?
     Clementine and the Moon (was Re: plans, and absence thereof)
                                 DC-X
                      Goddard held responsible?
           Here's an example of an anonymous post (2 msgs)
                     Joe Shea - NASA SSF (2 msgs)
                 Kill or ignore: Just a Test - Sorry!
                          Life in the Galaxy
                 Light Pollution Information Sources
                              McElwaine
                            NASA and gold
                          Retraining at NASA
                Solar Array vs. Power Tether SSF Drag
                       SSI (Conestoga) adderss?
Threat of mass cancellings was Re: Anonymity is NOT the issue (3 msgs)
                 Winding trails from rocket (2 msgs)

    Welcome to the Space Digest!!  Please send your messages to
    "[e-mail]", and (un)subscription requests of the form
    "Subscribe Space <your name>" to one of these addresses: listserv@uga
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    (THENET), or [e-mail] (Internet).
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 11 Mar 1993 10:06 EDT
From: ERIC OVERTON <[e-mail]>
Subject: Alignment of planets?
Newsgroups: sci.space

Will an alignment of the planets occur in the near future
like in the year 2000?  Will all the planets be in this
alignment?

Eric

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 21:10:51 GMT
From: Martin Connors <[e-mail]>
Subject: Clementine and the Moon (was Re: plans, and absence thereof)
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail]
(Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey) writes:
> The major purpose of Clementine is to test SDI sensors in space. As
> long as they need to fly a couple of UV-visible and IR cameras, and a
> laser altimeter/LIDAR, they decided to do some lunar and asteroid
> science with them.

I heard about Clementine in detail at the 'Asteroid Hazard' meeting in
Tucson in January. The SDI people were taken to task by a noted scientist
for trying to stretch the limits of the anti-missile-missile treaty by not
testing this sort of stuff in NEO where it would be directly forbidden,
but sending the same equipment into Deep Space and testing it there.

Any knowlegible people have a comment? Apart from the moral aspects
Clementine sounds like a dream mission.

Disclaimer: above may seem a bit evasive but direct quotes from what was
said at the meeting are not appropriate in this context.

--
Martin Connors         |
Space Research         | [e-mail]  [phone]
University of Alberta  |

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

Date: 12 Mar 1993 22:51:22 GMT
From: Andy Cohen <[e-mail]>
Subject: DC-X
Newsgroups: sci.space

I had the incredible honor to get a detailed tour of the Delta Clipper-X...
 and I'd like to try sharing some of it with you all....

I went over there on my daily lunch time walk-by and saw a group of MDA
folk getting a tour ..... so I ...walked over and joined them....
I got to hear the end of the description of how the hydraulic system on the
engine gimbles work....We were then invited to climb the stairs to get a
closer look at the upper sections...some of the buildings here are tall and
made for working on titans and deltas.....  The interior of the DC-X was
exposed with the exterior-Dick Rutan-produced shell standing on it's German
produced landing gear off to the side...  I got a closeup view of the
Oxygen tank which looked like it came from a titan booster or possibly a
delta-large cylindrical and takes up at least 2/3 of the interior...  The
sperical hydrogen tanks are in a framework which sits on top of the O2
tank. The same framework has a platform over the H2 tanks which house the
avionics...which are off the shelf from the F-15 program.  I also got to
see the hydraulics for the side flaps.... Everything is literally
OFF-THE-SHELF....rivets, connectors...cables are longer than they needed to
be just in case of a design change.....DC-X is a perfect example of
concurrent engineering in the extreme!

The outside shell is square on the bottom and narrows at the top to a
circle.  Each side has a large flap which is used like the stabilizer on a
jet to control the DC.....along with the flaps, and the engine gimbeling,
the tour guide told me that the engines are throttled at different rates to
also control DC direction...the use of all three are supposed to be enough
to.....turn it around for a landing.......

The landing gear are not strong enough to hold a fully loaded
DC-X...instead a launch frame holds the infrastructure and during flight at
some point the foor "legs" extract then help absorb shock at
landing...along with the engines......

We were standing at the opening of the building looking at the landing gear
when.....Pete Conrad strolled by and went into a trailer....  I immediately
realized that the trailer housed the launch control system..... After
telling the tour guide of the support for DC-X coming from the people here
at sci.space I asked if I could go into the control trailer....  It was
great!  a set of Silicon Graphics workstations all with highly interactive,
graphical representations of the DC-X flight systems..all running a liftoff
simulation and tied directly to the avionics on the real bird.....Pete's
console had a display of an ADI-like presentation to give some idea of the
reliationship of DC-X orientation with the Earth surface.  There were
graphical representations of the engines and the flaps too......it was a
lot like what I and my team have been developing for SSF.

The team in the trailer were happy to exchange technical details.... I told
them that I'd trade my slot on SSF for a seat, but they all.....laughed!

They were MOST interested in hearing about YOUR support.

I agreed to carry hard copies of posts from here to their facility as a
morale booster.....they say they work 40 hour days there....... and are
looking forward to months in the desert.......They do not know about how
this communitee feels about their efforts...so SPEAK UP!!

I will be uploading for FTP more stuff....stay tuned!!  Just 3 more weeks
to the rollout!!!

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

Date: 12 Mar 93 18:41:20 GMT
From: fred j mccall 575-3539 <[e-mail]>
Subject: Goddard held responsible?
Newsgroups: sci.space

In <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Tom) writes:


>automobile, responsible for untold numbers of marriges and conceptions,
>as well as 350,000 deaths annually in the U.S., or...

Isn't that figure just a tad high?

--
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[e-mail] - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 19:46:01 GMT
From: "John Q. Random" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Here's an example of an anonymous post
Newsgroups: news.admin.policy,news.admin.misc,sci.space,alt.privacy

What does it take for people to realize that anyone can be anyone they
choose? You don't have to use any damn anonymous service, you can say
what the hell you want by just getting a random account like this one
and posting away.

Give me a break, people. Choose something else to get mad about...
like inappropriate postings or cascades. This one you cannot do anything
about.

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 20:49:41 GMT
From: "J. Q. Random" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Here's an example of an anonymous post
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail]
(John Q. Random) wrote:
>
> What does it take for people to realize that anyone can be anyone they
> choose? You don't have to use any damn anonymous service, you can say
> what the hell you want by just getting a random account like this one
> and posting away.
>
> Give me a break, people. Choose something else to get mad about...
> like inappropriate postings or cascades. This one you cannot do anything
> about.

I don't appriciate you forging my name!

The real J.Q. Random

[e-mail]

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

Date: 12 Mar 93 19:21:22 GMT
From: "Kieran A. Carroll" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Joe Shea - NASA SSF
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Matthew R. Feulner) writes:
>
>I meant to followup to the article which mentioned him, but I lost it.
>
>Anyway, he has been a prof here at MIT for a few years coming here
>from Raytheon, I believe.  He had a big part in the increased
>reliability of the Patriot missle (reliability, as in it fires
>when you want, not as in it hits when you want).  He tought a
>spacecraft design course which a few of my friends took, and said
>was decent.  I saw him give a number of talks, and he sounded
>like a fellow with a great deal of common sense.  I believe
>NASA did themselves a world of good by getting him.
>
>Matt

For those of you who ahven't read the book "Apollo:
The Race to the Moon", Joe Shea worked for NASA between
1961 and about 1967. In 1961 he was hired to wring a decision

out of NASA Marshall and (what would become) Johnson,
regarding "how to get to the moon" (i.e. Earth-orbit
rendezvous vs. Lunar-orbit rendezvous vs. direct-ascent).
His big success there seems to have been to bring the
Huntsville and Houston cultures together, allowing them
to agree on the technical merits and drawbacks of
the various modes.

He then moved on to head the Apollo Spacecraft Program
Office. The book credits him with saving what was a
sick program, through inspiring leadership and great
technical competence. Both of these episodes certainly
would make him seem to be a good man to handle a reorganization/
redesign of the Space Station program.

--

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

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 22:06:56 GMT
From: Dave Michelson <[e-mail]>
Subject: Joe Shea - NASA SSF
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail]
(Kieran A. Carroll) writes:
>
>[Joseph Shea] then moved on to head the Apollo Spacecraft Program
>Office. The book credits him with saving what was a
>sick program, through inspiring leadership and great
>technical competence. Both of these episodes certainly
>would make him seem to be a good man to handle a reorganization/
>redesign of the Space Station program.

I've always thought it was really sad that he and Harrison Storms (NAA)
were chosen to take the big fall for the Apollo 1 fire.  Anything I have read
about these two men in the past several years seems to be summed up by the
phrase "inspiring leadership and great technical competence".

On the topic of SSF redesign, now would be a good time for those who are
interested to reread "Living and Working in Space", the NASA History Series
book on Skylab.

Things haven't changed much in twenty-five years.  Apart from all the
problems with redesigns and budget cuts, the biggest problem for
Skylab designers was finding experiments for the crews to perform.
I had always thought that the supply exceed the demand, and, I suppose,
in a sense it did.  But there were relatively few experiments that took
real advantage of the volume available in the workshop.  And life sciences
experiments, supposedly the major justification for Skylab, weren't
looked at very closely until relatively late in the design phase of the
program.

---
Dave Michelson                             University of British Columbia
[e-mail]                                  Antenna Laboratory

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

Date: 12 Mar 93 10:32:01 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Kill or ignore: Just a Test - Sorry!
Newsgroups: sci.space

TEST
TE
ST
test

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

Date: 12 Mar 93 23:34:20 GMT
From: Jeff Bytof <[e-mail]>
Subject: Life in the Galaxy
Newsgroups: sci.space

            Some Thoughts on Technological Life in the Galaxy
            -------------------------------------------------
I.

If technological life were abundant in the galaxy (and I don't think it
is) then we might have to face annihilation or assimilation with a fair
degree of certainty, in my opinion.  Not that they would travel here
directly, but that when the "galactic conversation" got around to biology
they (and we) might want to trade DNA sequences.  Whatever the importance
to our science of such an exchange, it might give them the knowledge to
effectively introduce something nasty into our biosphere, and do it by
either unwitting cooperation on our part or by swift dispatch of a
small ampule to our Solar System and Earth.  This is what I would call
the "Galactic Jungle" model.

II.

On the other hand, I believe that technological life is very sparse in
the Galaxy, and so favor the "Desert" model.  A possible activity in such a
model would be the placement in counter-revolving galactic orbits of a
series of automated stations that would be designed to relay general
astronomical information back to the home planet.  Our Pioneers and Voyagers
are early designs of this idea.  The stations might be set up to generate
their own power by passing wires through the galactic magnetic field and
would have instrumentation designed to detect signals from civilizations
like ours.  I estimate as the most probable scenerio that any systematized
transmission we receive from another technological civilization will be
from an automated probe within 1000 light years.  Thus we have quite a
while to wait before such a station detects the earth.  The placement
of automated probes effectively increases N in the Drake equation, and
perhaps we should add factors to the equation that estimates the number of
working probes that technological civilizations deploy and how long
they might last.

-rabjab

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 20:32:49 GMT
From: Larry Klaes <[e-mail]>
Subject: Light Pollution Information Sources
Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.space,sci.misc,sci.environment,talk.environment,sci.energy

    I have two sources to assist in the light pollution battle:

        The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) is one of your best
    resources for material on light pollution.  Their address is:

        International Dark-Sky Association
        Dave Crawford, President
        3545 N. Stewart
        Tucson, Arizona 85716
        U.S.A.

    E-Mail Address:  [e-mail]

        As the Editor of the Electronic Journal of the Astronomical
    Society of the Atlantic (EJASA), an electronic periodical dedicated
    to the promotion and enjoyment of astronomy and space exploration
    published each month on USENET, I have available the following EJASA
    articles on light pollution:

        "Stopping Space and Light Pollution", by Larry Klaes and Phil
    Karn - September 1989

        "When the Light Gets in Your Eyes, You Shouldn't Have to Drive
    to the Country", by James Smith and Ken Poshedly - February 1991

        "Curbing Light Pollution in Ohio", by Robert Bunge - June 1991

        "Street Lights: The Real Cost", by Steve and Stephanie Binkley -
    August 1991

        "The Battle Against Light Pollution in Central Ohio", by Earl W.
    Phillips, Jr. - September 1991

        You may find these EJASA articles through the ASA anonymous FTP
    site at chara.gsu.edu (131.96.5.29), or you may E-Mail me for the
    issues.

    Good luck!

        Larry Klaes  [e-mail]
             or - ...!decwrl!verga.enet.dec.com!klaes
                 or - [e-mail]
                     or - [e-mail]

             "All the Universe, or nothing!" - H. G. Wells

        EJASA Editor, Astronomical Society of the Atlantic

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 93 16:05:14 EST
From: Tom <[e-mail]>
Subject: McElwaine

>>                      ALTERNATIVE Comet Rendezvous Mission
[...]

>I remember seeing this almost a year ago.  It is the same exact article.
>Someone posted that they wanted info on McEwaine to complain.

I had suggested, amidst arguments about what to do with McElwaine, that we
wait for him to resume his behavior after telling him our problems, before
we nail him to the wall (since that was what many suggested).  Removing Net
access is a serious thing, after all.  You know; benefit of the doubt.

Well, people did complain, and now he's still (re-)posting his stuff, so, if
someone  wants to go after him, I won't have a problem with it.  He got a
decent warning.

>sheesh.  if there's anything worse than crackpot posts, it's gotta be
>*recycled* crackpot posts.

I'd rather not see any long, re-re-cycled posts, regardless how good they were.
I've ignored this ALTERNATIVE COMETY thing at least 10 times.

-Tommy Mac
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom McWilliams | 517-355-2178 (work) \\     Inhale to the Chief!
[e-mail]  | 336-9591 (hm)\\  Zonker Harris in 1996!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Date: 12 Mar 93 20:05:27 GMT
From: Greg Moore <[e-mail]>
Subject: NASA and gold
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>
>This is scary when this question is posed by someone at NASA hq.
>

    Careful here Dennis.  You know as well as I do that not everyone at NASA
works in the SPACE end.  Remember what that first A stands for.  Besides, at
a headquarters, they are probably dealing more with paperwork than metal work.

Be fair to the person.


>Dennis, University of Alabama in Huntsville
>

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 93 17:37:28 EST
From: Tom <[e-mail]>
Subject: Retraining at NASA

>>>[Does NASA's charter say it is]  a welfare agency for engineers and
>>>MIS managers? I must've lost that page.

>>It isn't.  But it's a fact of life, like it or not.
>>Go work the numbers.  So what are you supposed to do with these people, have
>>them flip burgers?

Nick sez;
>This raises a really good point.  Here we have a very sad story,
>thousands of managers and engineers who have been working on obsolete
>projects in an political climate where...,
      `
>I really feel for these people.  If you had this stuff on your
>resume, you wouldn't have a comet's chance in the sun's core
>of your resume landing anywhere but the trash:

>[sad tale of the effects of no competetion or marketing deleted]

>I'm no fan of Bill Clinton, but he has one good idea,
>and that's retraining programs for obsolete workers.

[Ideas for retraing deleted]

>If NASA engineers & managers balk at this retraining program...

IF!?  Whaddya mean 'if'?  They already are balking.  Look how people
react when it's suggested that NASA isn't doing a very good job.
Mention competition, and they bemoan job loss, National Prestige, etc.
Mention cost accounting and they hide behind Congress, as if you
could have a NASA without a Congress.

Look on the bright side.  If people continue to try to get jobs at
NASA, then, 5 or 10 years from now, when it finally is closed
down, or at least scaled back, the people that get displaced can't
bitch about no warning.  You people from NASA, reading this now,
go warn your friends.

Cuz the options, from what I can see, are either scale NASA back, and
let the free market take a shot at using space resources, or run out
of dough, with no space frontier to solve the problem, because NASA
let it slide one or two decades too long.  Then NASA will get scaled
back anyway, out of uselessness.  At least now parts of NASA are
useful and good.  Maybe they should lobby for breaking NASA into parts,
before the political mire brings down what parts of NASA are any good.

I really like the things JPL, for example, does; Low cost, high info.
value, and the public likes it a lot.  Why not get their own funding,
seperate from NASA?

-Tommy Mac
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom McWilliams | 517-355-2178 (work) \\     Inhale to the Chief!
[e-mail]  | 336-9591 (hm)\\  Zonker Harris in 1996!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 22:17:35 GMT
From: David Pugh <[e-mail]>
Subject: Solar Array vs. Power Tether SSF Drag
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Kieran A. Carroll) writes:
|> Oh well, tethers create 5 times as much drag as this, for the
|> same amount of power generated. If you want to generate electricity
|> by burning hydrazine, it looks like you'd be better off doing
|> it in an APU, which wouldn't affect your orbital altitude...
|> --
|>      Kieran A. Carroll @ U of Toronto Aerospace Institute
|>      uunet!attcan!utzoo!kcarroll [e-mail]

OK ... how about running backwards? If tether drag > array drag, then
(assuming reasonable efficiencies), tether thrust should also be greater
than the array drag. Does it make sense to increase the size of the solar
power arrays and dump the "excess" energy into a tether? A nice bonus is
that the larger arrays could also supply high demand, short durration
experiments. A down side is that running the tether boost almost continually
might mess up some microgravity experiments. Then again, Fred may not be a
good place for microgravity research (too many astronauts jumping around). Of
course, as bad as jumping astronauts are, it still beats trying to do micro-
gravity research on Earth (:-).

Any hope of getting a man-tended free flyer in an orbit that would allow it
to be tended from Fred? I seem to remember the ESA talking about something
like that, but don't know if it died from lack of funds or because of safety
concerns.
--
... He was determined to discover the        David Pugh
underlying logic behind the universe.        ...!seismo!cmucs!dep
    Which was going to be hard, because
there wasn't one.    _Mort_,  Terry Pratchett

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 20:14:00 GMT
From: Charles Pooley <[e-mail]>
Subject: SSI (Conestoga) adderss?
Newsgroups: sci.space

Does anyone have Internet add. for Space Services Inc, maker of the
Conestoga rocket?   Or the new parent company or the pres vp or any officer
of SSI.   Possible business.   Email reply much appreciated.....
--
Charles Pooley                  [e-mail]    GEnie  c.pooley
EE consultant, Los Angeles, CA

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 15:46:50 -0500
From: Nicholas Kramer <[e-mail]>
Subject: Threat of mass cancellings was Re: Anonymity is NOT the issue
Newsgroups: news.admin.policy,news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk,sci.space,alt.privacy

(KK=[e-mail])

??>   No-one has appointed you as the moderator of all the non-alt groups
??>   retrospectively or otherwise, and no-one is likely to appoint anyone
??>   else in such a position either.

KK>Let's take that one again, from the other end of the same equation:

KK>"No-one has appointed Johan the arbiter to inflict his unusual
KK> news system on all the non-alt groups..."

 "Two wrongs does not make a right." I'm undecided about the anonymous
service, but I think cancelling everything from there is overreaction
and made more obnoxious because it is done by a single person.


                        Nick

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

Date: 12 Mar 93 20:19:09 GMT
From: Ken Garrido <[e-mail]>
Subject: Threat of mass cancellings was Re: Anonymity is NOT the issue
Newsgroups: news.admin.policy,news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk,sci.space,alt.privacy

A person (who shall remain anonymous heehee) spake thusly :
>     I am testing a shell script to carry out "Automated Retroactive
>Minimal Moderation" in response to Julf's (and your) suggestion that
>the only way to control anonymous posting to groups that don't want it
>is through moderation.  It cancels articles posted from anon.penet.fi.
>I've tested it on recycled postings with a "local" distribution and
>it works nicely.  I propose to arm "ARMM" with an unrestricted
>distribution for the "sci" hierarchy this weekend if Julf doesn't
>accept the proposed compromise or a reasonable alternative by then.

Now I'm not a news wizard, but can't you generate a file which *automatically*
screens the messages which are presented to you ? That file contains regular
expressions which match offensive topics and user ids ?

I'm not keen on anonymous posting, but I'm also not keen on fundamentalist
christian ravings, censorship, sexual practices involving foods, discussions
of yugoslavian culture, etc. So when I encounter those things, I _just_ _don't_
_listen_.

Why don't we _just_ _not_ _listen_ to anonymous posts ?



--
There is no God save Entropy and His prophet is Darwin.

Ken Garrido     [e-mail]     Martin Marietta Aerospace

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

Date: 12 Mar 93 23:56:22 GMT
From: Bill Stewart [phone] <[e-mail]>
Subject: Threat of mass cancellings was Re: Anonymity is NOT the issue
Newsgroups: news.admin.policy,news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk,sci.space,alt.privacy

In response to the anonymous mass assassination proposal,
In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Dave Hayes) writes:
   How very nice of you.
   Have you considered that your actions may cause many news admins to cancel
   all control messages coming from your site?

This brings up an interesting technical problem -
for the popular news distribution systems, e.g. C News, NNTP, etc.,
who wins the race between a control message and a site's killfile,
if it has one?  Can you set up an appropriately designed killfile to
kill clumsily-forged cancel messages?

--
#                Pray for peace;      Bill
# Bill Stewart 1-908-949-0705 [e-mail] AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ
# Sacrifice is when you give up something valuable that's *yours*.
# Making other people give up valuable things of *theirs* is called
# other things :-)    Keep your politicians honest out there!

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

Date: 12 Mar 93 17:03:04 GMT
From: boyd johnson <[e-mail]>
Subject: Winding trails from rocket
Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.meteorology,sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Joe Cain) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (boyd johnson) writes:
>>
>> > It always seems to resemble something like what you'd get if you took
>> > the northern lights (aurora borealis) stretched them out, then let it
>> > snap into a tangled mess.
>
>the direction of glow streamers from gases due to the aurora should be
>oriented along the ambient magnetic field. i.e. the energizing
>particles should be painting the field lines. Thus there should be no
>"kinks"

I used the comparison to aurora because the trail was multi-colored.
However it disappeared when no longer illuminated by the sun.  I
believe this would be caused by a rainbow effect of solar refraction
rather than magnetic field influence.  From what I recall the colors
did not curve with the trail, but were stratified in horizontal bands.

A related question; Are the aurora (borealis & australis) in direct
sunlight at the high latitudes they are at or does the solar radiation
(of whatever frequency causes it) bend toward the earth to cause the
fluorescence?

I realized after posting the original article most Southern
Californians can't relate to the aurora, since we don't see them here.
However, being raised 30 miles from Canada I saw them a lot.

>>We used to launch in evening twilight, when the ground was dark but the trails
>>at high altitudes would be in sunlight.
>
>Some of the luminous trails launched from Wallops were barium releases
>so the material ionized by solar uv would respond to the electric
>fields in the presence of the geomagnetic field.
...
>Alternately, were the trails responding to a neutral wind?

Does neutral wind mean electrically uncharged air currents?

I'm taking the liberty of quoting from a reply that I received via
email from another witness of this week's launch that has an incoming
only usenet site.

From: Dave Cox <[e-mail]>
This was a Minuteman
ballistic missile being fired to Kwajelin (sp?) atoll in the Marshall
islands. The breakup and bending of the contrail is indeed do to strong
winds at very high altitude. It did occur to me that a rocket might have
gone totally berzurk, but it would be destroyed long before it could
create anything of that scope. That was a spectacular one, wasn't it?

Thanks to all who replied.

--
====== Boyd Johnson   nosc!spectra.com!johnson  San Diego, California ======
    Intermittent newsfeed at best and only to selected groups.
    My opinions certainly don't match those of my employer.

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

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 22:03:49 GMT
From: Brad Whitehurst <[e-mail]>
Subject: Winding trails from rocket
Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.space,sci.geo.meteorology

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Art Berggreen) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (boyd johnson) writes:
>>I'm new to these groups, so flame me easy if this is a FAQ.
>>
>>I'm sure many of you in Southern California saw the rocket contrail from
>>Vandenberg Air Force Base last night (Tuesday) at sunset.  I have never
>>seen one as it is created, but have seen it many times some time after
>>it happens.
...
>>Is it the wind currents that twists the contrail or does the rocket
>>follow a looping, circling route?  Also, it is always the same time of
>>day.  Is this the only time the contrails are visible from a distance,
>>or is it when the best atmospheric conditions exist for launch?
>>I am about 250 miles from VAFB, so I assume it is visible from
>>beyond the Mexican border to San Francisco or so.
>>
>I grew up about 25 mi. from VAFB and have seen quite a few launches.
>(Watching a staging during a night launch is especially impressive)
>
>The missile usually follows a fairly straight course as it arcs out above the
>pacific on its way.  The ballistic missile tests are usually aimed at the
>Quagualeen (sp?) Atoll in the pacific.  Orbital launches are often headed
 ^^^^^^^^^^
Kwajalein, I believe.



--

Brad Whitehurst    |   Aerospace Research Lab
[e-mail] |   We like it hot...and fast.

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End of Space Digest Volume 16 : Issue 308
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