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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: space news from June 11 AW&ST
Message-ID: <1990Jul23.045611.8147@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 90 04:56:11 GMT

[There will be a delay before further issues, because I lost the June 18
issue briefly and haven't started reading it yet.]

Four-day Magellan dry run, including no-target radar tests, successful; 
everything appears to be ready for Venus.  The star-calibration problem
appears to have been solved by software changes.

First major Soviet space-program museum exhibit in US opens at the Boston
Museum of Science.  It will tour several other US cities this fall.  Eight
Soviet technicians accompany it to explain the equipment.

The Space Exploration Initiative looks to be in for a rough time in Congress.

Images from Voyager's "group portrait".  As predicted, the planets are just
little dots, although Jupiter and Saturn just barely show disks.  No Pluto
or Mercury, as planned, and scattered sunlight overwhelmed Mars's image.
Earth very nearly got lost too; its image has a strong scattered-sunlight
background, but the planet is visible.

The Voyagers are now being turned over to a much smaller staff at JPL, to
free up people for newer missions.  The imaging systems will be shut down
this summer, and the only major science activity remaining will be the
watch for heliopause encounter.  If everything keeps working, the Voyagers
should be in touch for about another 25 years (the limit being the steady
decay of their isotope power packs), out to a radius of about 130 AU.  The
heliopause is thought to lie at maybe 100 AU.

Total Voyager pricetag so far, including launches, is $865M.  Another $30M
has been budgeted, so far, for post-Neptune monitoring and control.

NASA picks Martin Marietta and TRW for detailed studies of a robot
satellite servicer, mounting MM's Flight Telerobotic Servicer [the
most flagrant Congressional pork-barrel project for the space station]
on TRW's Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle [which has just been cancelled!].

Astro-1 shuttle mission slips badly as Columbia rolled back to VAB due
to hydrogen leak.  This will take some juggling, as both active VAB bays
are already occupied.  The pad with partly-stacked SRBs for STS-40 (Spacelab
Life Sciences) will be parked either on pad 39B or near the VAB for the
moment, to clear High Bay 3.  High Bay 1 is occupied by Atlantis.

Once Astro-1 and SLS (also scheduled to use Columbia) fly, Columbia will
be out of service for five months or so for modernization and changes to
turn it into the long-duration orbiter.

Discovery's right payload bay door accidentally snagged by hook during
operations in the Orbiter Processing Facility, and flexed before anyone
noticed.  Door and hinges are being checked for damage, but none is
expected.

West Germany's Roentgen Satellite (Rosat) is up, launched June 1 by Delta
from the Cape.  Checkout and calibration are underway; once this is done,
in early August, Rosat will do a six-month X-ray sky survey.

NASA cancels the OMV, citing funding shortages and little near-term need.
The only firm plans for its use were reboost of HST and AXAF, which can
be done [not as well] by the shuttle itself.  [This is a really stupid,
shortsighted decision.  Limited though it was, OMV would have added a
whole range of capabilities that NASA simply does not have right now.
Once more, we see the vicious circle at work:  nobody plans to use
capability X until the hardware for it is operational, because they
can't be sure it will be built, and so it is cancelled for lack of
firm customers.  Sigh.]

Kristall is having docking problems at Mir.  [As usual, the Soviets
fixed it.]

Trade-bill amendment in the House forbids export of any US-built
satellite intended for launch on a Chinese booster.  No word on it
from Senate yet.  Two of the three Hughes satellites recently cleared
for Long March launch [as a fulfillment of pre-Tiananmen promises]
have not yet been shipped.

This week's "Market Supplement", with light technical content and heavy
advertising, is on the building of HST.  A few nice pictures.

Visiting US delegation at Baikonur sees and photographs docking hardware
for Buran-Mir mission.  This will be the next Buran mission, possibly
next year, using the second orbiter.  No decision has yet been made on
whether the mission will be manned.  The delegation was told that a
third orbiter is under construction, and saw Energia #3 and #4 being
assembled.

Pictures, from the USAF Maui Optical Station, of the external tank from
the Discovery/HST mission burning up in the atmosphere.  The Maui site
is more normally used for photographing Soviet and US satellites,
including use of lasers to illuminate satellites [!!] for photography
during night passes.  The cameras are pretty good; for example, they can
tell whether a Soviet nuclear radarsat is operating by looking for the
red-hot glow of its reactor (in visible light, not IR).  They have been
used extensively to photograph shuttle orbiters, and are good enough to
give a fair picture of the payload-bay contents; one underlying motive
for this is getting a look at Buran payloads.  One minor discovery that
has come out of this program is that the visible plumes from the shuttle's
big thrusters are surprisingly long and tend to line up with the Earth's
magnetic field.

The unusually high HST mission put its ET burnup within range of Maui.
Reportedly, at least one missile-warning satellite also observed the
debris burnup.  The Maui photographs show a total of three explosions
during ET reentry, presumed to be rupture of the hydrogen tank, rupture
of the oxygen tank, and explosion of the ET's destruct system.  The
tank gradually breaks up into a rain of fragments, most of which are
thought to burn up before impact.  There was a large vapor cloud in
the upper atmosphere for some time after burnup.  The purpose of all
this photography was to determine how well the tank burns up without
its "tumble valve", which normally vents leftover propellant in such
a way as to make the tank tumble, encouraging it to break up early in
reentry.  Omitting the valve would save both weight and money, so it
was disabled for the HST launch as an experiment.  The Maui data says
that the tank tumbles anyway, so the valve is probably unnecessary.
-- 
NFS:  all the nice semantics of MSDOS, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
and its performance and security too.  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry