The crew of the space shuttle Endeavour recovered the Wake Shield Facility (WSF) satellite Thursday after three days of error-plagued tests, one part of a shuttle mission that has suffered an usually-high number of glitches.
The WSF was captured by the shuttle's robot arm and placed in the cargo bay Thursday, one of the few aspects of the satellite that took place without difficulty. The satellite suffered communications problems shortly after its release on Monday, which delayed the start of testing. Operations on the spacecraft were shut down Tuesday when the spacecraft overheated and began to wobble. When tests resumed Wednesday, an instrument designed to distribute atomic arsenic, a key element for the test, failed, forcing controllers to resort to manual controls.
The goal of the WSF is to create films of ultrapure semiconductors, possible only in "ultravacuum" conditions created by the spacecraft. The films could be used to create faster computer chips with a wide variety of applications. Seven films were to have been grown on the satellite in two days of free flight from the shuttle, but only five were completed after three days when the WSF was recovered.
Earlier in the mission, the Endeavour crew deployed and recovered the Spartan-201 satellite, which spent two days studying the solar wind. Its recovery was complicated when astronauts found it out of alignment. Engineers believe the spacecraft shut itself down shortly before recovery. How much data, if any, the satellite obtained will not be known until after the shuttle returns.
This mission has been plagued with more than its share of glitches. Fifteen problems had been recorded with the mission by early in the week, whereas many missions have recorded fewer than 10 over the entire mission. "We've had our more of our share of the little hitches," mission commander David Walker admitted in an interview with a Boston television station.
The shuttle is due to land Monday, September 14th, at 7:14am EDT at the Kennedy Space Center.
A crew of two Russians and one German have begun a four-month mission on the space station Mir to better study the effects of long-term weightlessness on the human body as well as other scientific projects.
German Thomas Reiter and Russian colleagues Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Avdeyev blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome at 5am EDT Sunday, September 4. Their Soyuz TM-22 capsule docked with Mir two days later.
The three-man crew relieved cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyov and Nikolai Budarin. The two had been aboard the space station since the end of the Mir-Atlantis docking mission in early July. Solovyov and Budarin, who came to the space station in the space shuttle Atlantis, returned to Earth earlier this week in a Soyuz capsule.
Reiter, Gidzenko, and Avdeyev will spend 135 days aboard Mir conducting a series of experiments in the life sciences, astrophysics, material sciences, and technology. They will also host the second Mir-Atlantis docking, scheduled for late October.
Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are not concerned about a stuck valve on the Galileo spacecraft and say it should cause no problems as the spacecraft completes its six-year journey to Jupiter.
Mission controllers noticed in late August that a valve in the spacecraft's propulsion system is stuck open. The check valve, in the helium pressurization system, is designed to keep propellant vapor from migrating up the fuel system and reacting with oxidant. Such a reaction could damage the propellant feed system, but it is highly unlikely.
Controllers believe that managing the temperatures of the propellants will prevent any problems from occurring. "With temperature management, Galileo's maneuvers and mission will be unaffected by the open check valve," Bill O'Neil, Galileo project manager, said.
The inadvertent mixing of fuel and oxidant is believed to be the cause behind the loss of the Mars Observer spacecraft in August 1993. The fuel systems on each spacecraft, though, are different, and there is no evidence of a common design flaw.
Galileo is on final approach to Jupiter. The spacecraft will each the planet on December 7. A probe, released from the spacecraft during the summer, will descend into the atmosphere and relay data on its structure and composition while the orbiter begins a two-year tour of Jupiter and its moons.
A new space shuttle main engine, flown for the first time on Discovery in July, performed without any problems, NASA engineers announced August 28.
The engine used a newly-designed oxidizer pump for the first time. The pump contained ball bearings made of ceramics, rather than steel. These ball bearings were lighter and better able to handle high temperatures.
The next shuttle launch, Columbia, will use two of the new engines. Columbia was set to fly using three, but one of the engines was checked for a broken seal at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi shortly before being installed, and could not be replaced in time. Columbia will use an older-model engine in its place.
The first flight to use three new engines will be Endeavour's launch in the spring of 1996.
The Norwegian shipbuilding company Kvaerner A/S secured $170 million in contracts September 5 for its share of a new multinational launch system that will utilize former Soviet boosters launched at sea.
The multinational consortium, called SeaLaunch, plans to use a converted oil-drilling platform as a launch pad for Ukrainian-built Zenit boosters. A vessel will carry the booster and tow the launch pad from a port on the U.S. West Coast to a site in the Pacific for launch.
SeaLaunch is a joint project of four companies. In addition to Kvaerner A/S, the Ukrainian aerospace company NPO-Yuzhnoye will provide the Zenit boosters and the Russian firm of RSC-Energia will provide the Block DM upper stage for the booster. American aerospace giant Boeing in in charge of the overall project, as well as payload integration and development of the home port.
Kvaerner's contacts included a $78 million contract to its Rosenberg shipyard to convert a semi-submersible platform named the Odyssey into a launch pad. A $93 million contact went to another company for a roll-on, roll-off (ro-ro) vessel to transport the boosters from port to the launch site.
The first launch is scheduled for early 1998. Officials estimate that each launch, which will be able to place 5900 kg (13,000 lbs) into geostationary orbit, will cost $60-90 million.
An Australian cabinet minister announced September 4 that two Russian rocket companies have found a number of potential launch sites in the country for use by small launch vehicles.
Construction Minister Chris Schacht said that the two companies, STC Complex and the Cosmos Group, had found several sites on the continent suitable for launch sites. Both companies, however, expressed an interest in the facilities already in place in Woomera, in central Australia.
The announcement is a boost for attempts to create a thriving commercial space industry in Australia. The last attempt at a commercial launch facility in Australia was several years ago, when plans for a spaceport at Cape York, the northernmost point on the continent, were scrapped.
The two Russian companies are interested in launching payloads up to one ton in mass into low Earth orbits no more than 800 km (500 mi) high. Although some launch facilities exist at Woomera, site of British rocket tests in the 1950s and 60s, upgraded facilities would be required for the Russian efforts.
Observations of a cluster of galaxies by the Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed earlier work that supports what may be the ultimate paradox: a universe younger than some of its suns.
The results, released in the British science journal Nature last week, estimated the age of the universe to be 9.5 billion years old, plus or minus 1.1 billion. Stars located in some globular clusters have been found to be 12 to 17 billion years old, however.
Since the stellar ages carry a high degree of confidence, astronomers are left to revise their theories of the nature of the universe. One solution, according to Cambridge astronomer Nial Tanvir, is to reduce the mass of the universe by 90 percent. Such a reduction would increase the age of the universe to 12.5 billion years.
Cosmologists are taking another look at the cosmological constant as a solution to the paradox. Introduced, but later retracted, by Einstein, it assumes that there is a force counteracting the expansion of the universe. The cosmological constant could raise the age of the universe to as much as 18 billion years.
The observations were performed by a team of astronomers from Cambridge and Durham universities in Britain and the Space Telescope Science Institute in the US. The astronomers used Hubble to look at the nearby galaxy M96 to obtain an estimate of its distance, then used that distance to estimate the distance to the more distant Coma cluster of galaxies. This, combined with the known motion of the Coma cluster away from the Earth, provided a determination of the age of the universe.
Spanish astronomers have reported the discovery of a new brown dwarf star that they claim is more likely to be a brown dwarf than one discovered this summer.
The astronomers, working at the Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands, discovered the brown dwarf candidate in the Pleiades star cluster. The star, named Teide 1, is estimated to have only 8 percent of the mass of the Sun.
Brown dwarfs are small stars that are not large enough to sustain thermonuclear reactions in their cores. Because of this they are dim and difficult to locate. However, stellar theories predict that brown dwarfs may be as common as ordinary dim stars, and may account for a significant fraction of the "dark matter" which may make up 90 percent of the mass of the universe.
A team at the University of California Berkeley announced in June the discovery of another brown dwarf in the Pleiades. Their determination was based on finding lithium in the star, which an ordinary star should have destroyed. However, some astronomers believe that the object found by the Berkeley team may have been an "in-between" object between a low-mass star and a brown dwarf.
ASE Honors Poles: Three earthbound Poles were honored for their contributions to humanity by a group of astronauts and cosmonauts Monday. The Association of Space Explorers bestowed awards on Pope John Paul II, Polish President Lech Walesa, and science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem at the beginning of their 11th annual international conference, held in Warsaw. Seventy astronauts and cosmonauts were expected to attend the six-day conference in Warsaw's 16th-century royal castle.
Tsiklon Launch: A Tsiklon-3 rocket launched a Ukrainian marine satellite on August 31 from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in Russia, but a small Chilean satellite attached to the side of the main satellite failed to separate and appears to be unusable. The Sich-1 satellite, designed in Soviet times for ocean reconnaissance, is now being used by the Ukraine for marine research. The shoebox-sized Chilean satellite, built by a British aerospace company, was to study ozone levels.
Obituary: Reinhard Furrer: Reinhard Furrer, a German astronaut who flew on the space shuttle in 1985, died in an airplane accident September 8 in Berlin. The 54-year-old former astronaut died when his World War II era Messerschmitt 108 airplane crashed shortly after takeoff during an airshow. Furrer, the third German in space, flew on the Spacelab D1 mission in October 1985, the last successful flight of the shuttle Challenger. Furrer had been teaching space science at the Free University of Berlin.