Accompanying the March issue of SpaceViews was a short survey asking people to comment on the quality of the publication. Among the questions I asked was whether people would be interested in a short e-mail update on current space news, to be sent out in the middle of the month as a supplement to SpaceViews. The resounding answer, from Florida to Finland, was yes! Thus, SpaceViews Update (or SV Update for short) is born.
This publication is intended to provide readers with recent developments (that is, within the last 2-3 weeks) in various aspects of space science, policy, and technology. Most of the news here is available elsewhere, either on the Internet or from print media. The goal of this publication is to pull the information together into a collection of concise articles with a high signal-to-noise ratio. Longer, in-depth articles on these fields will remain in SpaceViews, along with all its other current features.
For the present time, SV Update will be sent out to the same mailing list as SpaceViews. Since there may be some people interested in only one publication and not both, this will probably change in the near future, with a separate mailing list for each. SV Update is designed to be a short publication (10-15 Kbytes of ASCII text), so it should not be much of an additional burden to users' mailboxes.
As with SpaceViews, SV Update will be available in text and
hypertext (HTML) formats on the World Wide Web. The text version is
also available by FTP. The text version is available at:
ftp://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/pub/info/newsletters/spaceviews/update/950315.txt
and the HTML version is available at:
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/spaceviews/update/950315.html
Both of these documents can be accessed from the SpaceViews home page
at:
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/spaceviews
Since SV Update is still very much an experiment, any feedback,
positive or negative, is appreciated. You can send comments by e-mail
to jeff@astron.mit.edu, or by regular
mail to:
Any press releases or other notices about space-related events can be sent to me at either address.
Norman Thagard became the first American astronaut to go into space on a non-American launch vehicle Tuesday when the Soyuz spacecraft carrying him and two Russian cosmonauts launched flawlessly from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The launch was the start of a three-month mission for Thagard that will culminate in a docking between the Russian space station Mir and the American space shuttle Atlantis in June.
The Mir-18 mission launched on schedule at 11:13am local time (1:13am EST) in -9 degree Celsius (16 degree Fahrenheit) weather. The spacecraft, carrying Thagard, Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady Strekalov, reached orbit ten minutes after launch. Soyuz will dock with Mir on Thursday.
Thagard is the only American astronaut scheduled to ride into space on Soyuz. Future joint US-Russian missions will use the American shuttle Atlantis for crew transfers. Atlantis is equipped with an adaptor to allow it to dock with Mir. The adaptor will be used for the first time on the June mission, when Thagard, Dezhurov, and Strekalov will be replaced by two Russian cosmonauts launched aboard Atlantis.
Thagard has been careful to observe many of the small rituals performed by cosmonauts before launch. Although he did break one tradition by handing out crew patches before the launch, he and the other cosmonauts observed one of the oldest traditions, and perhaps the most unusual: urinating on a tire of the bus that carried the crew to the launch pad. This ritual was reported first performed by Yuri Gagarin before his historic launch in 1961 and has been repeated thereafter by all cosmonauts -- men and women -- before launch.
The shuttle Endeavour continued its ultraviolet astronomy mission which began March 2, but nixed plans to extend the mission by 2 days on Tuesday. The 16-day mission, the longest shuttle mission to date, is scheduled to end Friday afternoon.
The mission to date has been an unqualified success. The Astro-2 payload of three ultraviolet telescopes has been used to observe objects ranging from volcanic eruptions on Io (see related article below) to the galaxy M87, a likely location of a supermassive black hole. The crew has been split into two teams, each working 12-hour shifts, to maximize the amount of scientific data returned.
The success of the mission had prompted scientists to ask NASA for a 1- or 2-day extension to the mission to gather additional data. However, due to possible weather problems at Kennedy Space Center this weekend, mission planners decided against a mission extension. The shuttle will land at KSC at 2:54pm EST Friday.
A popular adjunct to the mission has been the Astro-2 World Wide Web page. The page, with mission information, crew biographies, and an opportunity for people to send messages to the crew, has become one of the most popular sites on the Web. As of March 14th, the page has been accessed over 1.8 million times by computers in 57 countries. The Astro-2 Home Page can be reached at http://astro-2.msfc.nasa.gov/
A joint Rockwell International/Orbital Sciences Corporation team was awarded contracts for both the X-33 and X-34 reusable launch vehicle projects, NASA announced last week. The projects are a first step towards developing launch vehicles that will significantly decrease the cost of space access.
The Rockwell/OSC team is one of three teams awarded Phase One contracts from NASA for the X-33. A joint McDonnell Douglas/Boeing team and a Lockheed-Martin Marietta team were also awarded contracts. The Rockwell/OSC team also includes contributions from Northrup and FedEx. The teams will have 15 months to work on design and development of their proposed vehicles before one is selected for Phase Two development, including the construction of a flight demonstration vehicle.
Rockwell/OSC was the only team awarded a contract for the X-34. The X-34 will be joint development with NASA of a small reusable launch vehicle suitable for some commercial payloads.
Lunar Prospector, the first NASA mission to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, was selected by NASA as the next mission in the Discovery class of inexpensive, quick planetary missions. In addition, three other missions were selected for further review and later selection.
The $59 million Lunar Prospector will follow up on the BMDO/NASA Clementine mission last year. The spacecraft will carry several spectrometers and magnetometers to measure the surface composition, magnetic and gravity fields, and gas-release events on the Moon. The mission, if funded, will be launched in 1997 Despite the small mission cost, it faces potential trouble in Congress, where Rep. Larry Sensenbrenner (R-WI), chair of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, has opposed any new NASA programs.
The three missions scheduled for further study are Stardust, a cometary dust sample return mission; Venus Multiprobe Mission, a mission to drop 16 small probes into the Venusian atmosphere; and Suess-Urey, a solar wind sample return mission. One of these missions will be selected in the fall for development and launch.
Privatization of the shuttle and significant reorganization of NASA facilities are two changes that may be in store for NASA if the recommendations of several review panels are approved.
A review panel chaired by Dr. Christopher Kraft has proposed that the shuttle program should eventually be transferred to the private sector as the best way to improve efficiency and reduce costs. The shuttle program would initially be consolidated into a single contract, instead of the current 20 prime contracts and dozens of minor contracts. The panel believes that these steps would reduce the costs of the shuttle's "safety shield" without impinging on vehicle safety and would also create a more efficient management structure, further reducing costs.
Drafts of an internal "white paper" leaked to the media have included similar suggestions. The report called for the elimination of redundant activities among NASA centers, including the consolidation of many shuttle-related activities at Kennedy Space Center.
The Canadian Space Agency is facing a 12 percent cut in funding over the next ten years as the federal government launches an ambitious program to reduce its budget deficit. A budget proposal before the Canadian House of Commons would slash C$317 million (US$225 million) from the C$2.69 billion previously approved for Canadian space projects between 1995 and 2004. The budget proposal is expected to be approved by the House of Commons later this month.
Canada's contribution to International Space Station Alpha will suffer the smallest cuts. Funding will be cut by 5% to C$498 million over the next ten years. Other areas of the Canadian space program, including Earth observation, communications, science and technology programs face cuts of 11 to 16 percent.
Students worldwide got an unexpected surprise when they were among the first people to witness a volcanic eruption on Io. The students, participating in the JASON Project, saw the images as they were downloaded live from an observatory in Hawaii. The infrared images clearly showed a hot spot on the moon consistent with a major volcanic eruption.
The images, taken by Dr. John Spencer of Lowell Observatory using the 3-m telescope at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii, were part of a previously-scheduled classroom exercise where students would take the data and look for variations in the brightness of Io. The exercise was one part of the JASON Project, a program founded by Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard designed to give student the opportunity to participate in scientific exploration.
Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that Jupiter's moon Europa has an oxygen atmosphere, albeit an extremely thin one. Europa is only the fourth body in the solar system, after the Earth, Venus, and Mars, to have molecular oxygen in its atmosphere. With a surface pressure of only one hundred billionth of an atmosphere, the Europan atmosphere is so tenuous that, if compressed to standard atmospheric pressure on Earth, "it would fill only about a dozen Astrodomes," according to Johns Hopkins scientist Doyle Hall.
Scientists point out that, unlike the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere, the Europa oxygen does not have a biological origin. Sunlight, charged particles, and dust cause water molecules on Europa's icy surface to sublimate into gas, where a series of chemical processes convert the water vapor into molecular hydrogen and oxygen gas. Oxygen is formed continuously to replace molecules that escape Europa's feeble gravity.