The seven-member crew of the space shuttle Columbia -- not to mention NASA officials -- hope the number seven truly is lucky as they prepare for a Thursday launch after six launch delays.
The shuttle, originally set to launch in September 28, has been delayed six times in just over two weeks due to equipment problems and weather. The delays have forced the next shuttle mission, a docking mission with the Russian space station Mir, to be postponed at least one week.
The original launch date was postponed one week when engineers discovered a leak in a liquid hydrogen fuel valve in one of the shuttle's three main engines. Hurricane Opal and a hydraulic fuel leak each caused one-day delays, followed by a week's delay October 7 when a computer controller on the shuttle failed. Concern about a crack in one of the shuttles engines postponed Saturday's launch, and poor weather scrubbed Sunday's launch.
When Columbia is finally aloft, it will spend 16 days in orbit as its crew performs microgravity experiments. The crew, which includes five rookies, will split into two 12-hour shifts to study plant and crystal growth and fuel combustion, among other experiments.
If Columbia is unable to launch by the end of the week, NASA officials will likely delay the launch until late November, and focus attention instead on the shuttle Atlantis, scheduled for a early November launch. Atlantis is scheduled to dock with the Russian space station Mir for the second time this year.
Russian Space Agency officials announced Thursday that the three-man crew currently aboard the space station Mir, which includes one German, will spend up to an extra 44 days in orbit due to delays constructing a booster to launch the relief crew.
A lack of money at the plant building the Soyuz U-2 rocket is the cause for the delay, according to reports. The rocket, which will launch the Soyuz TM-22 capsule with a two-man crew, is behind schedule and will not be ready until more than a month after the scheduled date.
The current mission, named EUROMIR '95, is not expected to end until February 21. The original return date was January 13. The change met with approval with Russian and German space officials.
The mission extension should not incur any hardships for the crew. An unmanned Progress module docked with the station last week, providing the cosmonauts with additional supplies. Next month, the shuttle Atlantis will dock with the station.Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are studying an error in the Galileo's tape recorder which, if serious, could affect the mission's already-diminished scientific return.
The "anomaly", as NASA officially describes it, was discovered last Thursday after ground controllers ordered the spacecraft to rewind its recorder after taking several Jupiter images. The recorder continued to rewind after the end of the tape had been reached.
Controllers have placed the tape recorder in standby mode while investigating the problem. Engineers are taking their time to carefully study whether the problem is merely a software bug or a significant hardware problem.
The spacecraft's tape recorder became an important part of the spacecraft after the high-gain antenna failed to open en route to Jupiter. With only a low-gain antenna, with its much slower data rate, available, mission controllers planned to use the tape record images and other data during flybys of Jupiter's moons and during the Galileo probe's entry into Jupiter's atmosphere December 7. Without the tape recorder, considerably less data could be returned to Earth.
Iridium's plans for a global cellular telephone system using a constellation of satellites is ahead of schedule, with the first launch now scheduled for mid-1996, according to the company's chairman and CEO.
Bob Kinzie said work was six months ahead of schedule on the 66-satellite system that will provide cellular telephone service -- for a price -- anywhere in the world. Kinzie spoke at the Telecom 95 conference in Geneva, Switzerland, earlier this month.
The project, which has already spent $1.2 billion, will place 11 satellites, plus spares, in each of six orbits around the Earth, providing global coverage. The satellites are being built by Motorola, which is the prime contractor for the program as well as a major investor in Iridium, Inc.
When complete, the system will provide cellular service for about $3 per minute. Kinzie says the company plans to target high-income business people who need to be in constant contact with others, regardless of location. Kinzie estimates that there are at least 4.2 million people who are potential Iridium customers.
NASA announced a program last week to permit students around the nation the opportunity to take part in the design, construction, and operation of a space shuttle payload, called KidSat.
The program, a joint venture of JPL and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), is designed to teach students about space and science and give them a new perspective on the planet.
KidSat will initially consist of an electronic still camera and two video cameras. Students, as part of a planned curriculum, will be able to control these cameras to observe various areas of the Earth. More sophisticated experiments are planned for later flights of KidSat.
"By attaching KidSat to the Space Shuttle, students will be able to participate in space exploration as astronauts and cosmonauts do," Sally Ride, UCSD physics professor and former astronaut, said. The first American woman in space is leading the development of the mission operations aspect of the program.
Students in Pasadena and San Diego, California, and Charleston, South Carolina, will be involved in the initial phase of the program. UCSD plans to include participation from students in Baltimore, Houston, and Omaha in the near future.
Lockheed Martin convened a review panel earlier this month to investigate the cause of a failure of the company's first Lockheed Launch Vehicle rocket, which was destroyed shortly after launch August 15.
The Senior Review Panel includes 19 people from a variety of companies and agencies. Lockheed Martin, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the Aerospace Corporation, and insurance underwriters are represented on the panel. Also included are representatives from CTA, which built the GEMStar satellite which was destroyed on the rocket and is building the satellite for the next LLV launch, as well as TRW, which is building the satellite for the third LLV launch.
The panel, headed by Lockheed Martin vice president Forrest McCartney, will study flight data and other information, as well as the results of a previous review board. Lockheed Martin plans to release all its findings to the public after the review panel has completed its work.
Members of a House-Senate conference committee agreed to $25 million in funding for reusable rocket research in the Department of Defense (DOD) 1996 budget, far less than a previous House authorization but more than the Clinton Administration had asked.
Coming into the conference, the House had authorized $100 million for reusable rocket research and had appropriated $50 million, while the Senate had authorized nor appropriated any money. The Clinton budget sent to Congress contained no funding for DOD reusable rocket research.
After the conference committee met, however, the House voted down the committee's recommendations, based on issues not related to SSTO. The amount eventually appropriated to DOD SSTO research is not expected to change.The money would be given to the Air Force's Phillips Labs, where research in support of the X-33 single-stage to orbit program is underway. A conference committee to resolve NASA funding for the X-33 program is expected to take place in mid-October.
American astronomers confirmed Monday the report last week by a European team of a planet in orbit around a Sun-like star 40 light years from Earth.
Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler, using the 3-meter (120-inch) telescope at Lick Observatory south of San Jose, California, confirmed a "wobble" seen in the spectra of the star by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of Geneva Observatory. Mayor and Queloz reported their results at a conference in Italy October 6.
According to both teams, the candidate planet has about half the mass of Jupiter and orbits the star, 51 Pegasi, only 7.5 million kilometers (4.7 million miles) from the star, only 5% of the Earth-Sun distance. This would give the planet a surface temperature of 1000 degrees Celsius (1800 degrees Fahrenheit). The planet takes only four days to complete one orbit around the star.
Astronomers are unsure whether the planet formed that close to the star, or was somehow pushed closer to the star. Given the mass of the object, though, it is unlikely that the object is a dim binary star companion to the star.
Although three plants have previously been discovered orbiting a pulsar, this is the first time a planet has been discovered orbiting a Sun-like star. 51 Pegasi, a type G2IV star, is almost identical to the Sun in size and brightness.
Studies of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter by the Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered ozone around Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, and a bright new spot on the surface of the volcanic moon Io.
A team led by Keith Noll of the Space Telescope Science Institute used Hubble's Faint Object Spectrograph to detect the small amounts of ozone on the surface of the icy satellite. The ozone is believed to be created when energetic charged particles from Jupiter's magnetic field strike the moon's surface, disrupting water molecules in the ice, although the exact mechanism is unclear.
Another team, led by John Spencer of Lowell Observatory, used the Hubble's Wide Field/Planetary Camera 2 to image the surface of Io. They discovered a large yellowish-white area, about 320 km (200 mi) in diameter, not seen in images taken only 16 months ago. "[This new spot] is probably composed of material, probably frozen gas, ejected from [the volcano] Ra Patera by a large volcanic explosion or fresh lava flows," Spencer said.
These results were reported last week at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, meeting in Kona, Hawaii.
Ariane Launch Delayed: The launch of an Ariane 42L booster carrying a communications satellite was delayed Friday, one day before launch, after unspecified technical problems. No new launch date was immediately available. The launch, the ninth scheduled in the last six months, will deploy an American-built direct-TV satellite for a Luxembourg company. Arianespace officials have stepped up their launch rate to once every three weeks to cope with a backlog of 38 satellites.
Maybe A Short Haircut Will Help: NASA astronaut Scott Parazynski had to abandon training for a mission on the Russian space station Mir next year when Russian officials determined the 6-foot-plus astronaut was too tall to fit in their Soyuz capsules. Parazynski, backup to astronaut Jerry Linenger, was only 2 centimeters (0.8 inches) too tall, according to one report. Although Parazynski would have flown to and from the station in the American shuttle Atlantis, Russian officials required that all American astronauts be able to fit into a Soyuz should an emergency requiring quick evacuation take place.
No Caviar, But How About a Tube of Soup? As the Russian Space Agnecy continues to reel from funding problems, it has been forced to make cutbacks in the cosmonaut's menu: no more caviar. Caviar, which was sent to cosmonauts on the space station Mir for holidays and birthdays, will no longer be shipped. The plant which makes food for the cosmonauts says it a typical space meal costs 10 times as much as a typical meal, due to the number of stringent biological and chemical tests. To help cope with reduced budgets, the plant is marketing samples of space food, including tubes of soup and, to the general public. To date, sales have been very slow.
Obituary: Charles Lacy Veach: Charles Lacy Veach, a two-time shuttle astronaut, died October 3 in Houston of complications of cancer. Veach, who was born in Chicago but considered Honolulu as his hometown, was a combat pilot in Vietnam and a member of the Thunderbirds performance flying team before joining NASA in 1984. He flew aboard STS-39, an unclassifed Department of Defense mission, in 1991 and STS-52 in 1992.