The space shuttle Endeavour successfully captured a Japanese science satellite Saturday morning, completing the first major task of its nine-day mission.
Endeavour completed the retrieval of the Space Flyer Unit (SFU) at 6:39am EST Saturday. The capture was delayed by 90 minutes when the SFU's solar panels failed to retract properly. The unmanned satellite jettisoned the faulty panels, and the Endeavour's robot arm, operated by Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, placed the satellite in the shuttle's cargo bay.
The retrieval of the SFU was one of three major goals for STS-72. On Sunday, astronauts released the OAST-Flyer, a NASA science package that will fly free of the shuttle for two days before being retrieved and returned to Earth. The satellite, which takes it name from the former NASA Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology, carries a number of small experiments.
Later in the week, three astronauts will perform spacewalks, two at a time, to test techniques to be used for the assembly of the international space station. The astronauts will test how well tools and assembly techniques work in microgravity, and see how well their spacesuits protect them from the temperature extremes between sunlight and shadow.
The mission is the first of eight scheduled for 1996, one more than 1995. The shuttle manifest includes three dockings of the shuttle Atlantis with the Russian space station Mir, which will host a series of American astronauts starting in March.
Thursday's launch of the shuttle Endeavour may be NASA's last major project for the near future unless budget negotiators in Washington can reach an agreement to end the current budget impasse and approve NASA's 1996 budget.
Loren Shriver, manager of launch operations for NASA, said Thursday that plans were in place for an orderly shutdown of the space shuttle program starting as early as late January. "We can't do it overnight," Shriver said.
NASA's fiscal year 1996 budget was to have been approved by October 1 of last year, the start of the fiscal year. However, disputes between President Clinton and the Republican-led Congress over plans for a balanced budget have left NASA and other government agencies in limbo.
On January 5, Congress agreed to a continuing resolution that ended a three-week long partial shutdown of the government, the second shutdown since November. The resolution, which is in effect until January 26, provides partial funding for government agencies like NASA whose budgets have yet to be approved. The funding, however, is not enough to support all projects.
Last week, NASA officials advised its centers to begin making plans to cut costs. A NASA memo released by JPL advised Caltech, which operates JPL for the space agency, to create and prepare to implement plans to cut expenditures. Travel, overtime, hiring of new personnel, and some purchases were to be suspended by January 10. A second plan, to be submitted to NASA by January 17, calls for a partial shutdown of the center.
NASA is not the only space-related agency hurt by the budget impasse. NOAO, the NSF-funded agency that operates observatories on Kitt Peak in Arizona and Cerro Tololo in Chile, advised its employees that it has only enough money to continue paying employees through the end of January.
The Galileo spacecraft, in orbit around Jupiter, resumed normal operations on Tuesday, January 9, four days after a software conflict forced the spacecraft to enter a protective safe mode.
Galileo had been retransmitting data from the Galileo Probe stored on the spacecraft's main computer when the spacecraft entered safe mode. According to JPL officials, the onboard computer encountered a "relic" of special fault-protection software sent to the spacecraft before its arrival at Jupiter last month. The conflict with the old program caused the spacecraft to enter safe mode.
After analyzing the problem, engineers sent a series of routines to the spacecraft to restart normal operations, including transmitting science data stored on the spacecraft from the probe. Officials note that this event was the twelfth time Galileo had entered safe mode, each time without any serious consequences.
Meanwhile, officials at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, have rescheduled a press conference announcing the "quick look" science results from the probe data. The press conference had been scheduled for December 19, but the partial government shutdown forced a postponement of the conference when public relations employees were furloughed.
The press conference has been rescheduled for Monday, January 22, at 10am PST (1pm EST). It will be carried live on NASA Select television.
An engine key to Europe's new Ariane 5 booster passed a final test January 6, paving the way for the rocket's first launch in May.
The cryogenic central-stage engine burned for 10 minutes during a test at the Ariane launch facility in Kourou, French Guiana. The engine had been plagued with a number of problems that delayed the first launch of the Ariane 5, which had been scheduled for 1995.
With the successful test completed, plans are underway for the first launch in May. "After today's success we can confirm the May 7 date as we are right on schedule," Hughes Laporte-Vevada, a division head in the French space agency, said. A second Ariane 5 launch is planned for Autumn 1996.
The large booster, originally designed to launch the manned Hermes spaceplane, can carry up to 6.8 tons into geostationary transfer orbit. Arianespace, the French company that markets the Ariane 4, is expected to take over commercial operations of the Ariane 5 in 1997.
Malaysia joined the club of nations with spacecraft in orbit when an Ariane rocket launched a communications satellite for the East Asian nation late Friday.
The Malaysia East Asia Satellite (MEASAT-1) was carried into orbit by an Ariane 44L booster Friday evening from the Ariane launch facility in Kourou, French Guiana. This was the third attempt to launch the rocket; two previous attempts had been scrubbed by weather and technical problems.
The US$235 million satellite, built by Hughes, is owned by Bingariang Satellite Systems Sdn Bhd, a joint venture of Malaysian investors and American telecommunications company US West. The satellite will be used for "advanced video conferencing, point-to-point data capability and multiple broadcast facilities," said Duffy Swan, chief operating officer of Bingariang.
"I feel very happy because this is another step forward in our country's target to become a developed nation by the year 2020," Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad said shortly after the launch. He attended a breakfast in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, to watch a live broadcast of the launch.
NASA has offered Russia a proposal to delay the deployment of several Russian space station modules as a cost-cutting measure, rejecting a Russian proposal to use the Mir space station as the core of the international space station.
The counterproposal came during a series of talks between American and Russian officials last month in Houston. Russia, which believes that Mir can still be used for several more years, wanted to substitute it for other Russian-made modules to cut costs for the cash-strapped program.
NASA officials rejected the proposal, but provided a counterproposal designed to lessen Russia's up-front costs for the new space station. Under the proposal, three Russian research modules and a power platform would be delayed for several years. Two newer Mir science modules, Spektr and Priroda, may be used in their place.
To help reduce the needed number of Russian launches, NASA has offered to handle all crew transfers with the space shuttle. NASA will also accept a larger share of ground control duties, and may consider supporting continued use of the Mir space station into 1999. Mir was to be closed down after assembly of the international space station began in 1997.
In an attempt to create a more efficient, less expensive program, Russian officials announced plans to consolidate its cosmonaut training programs into a single center.
According to the plan, the largest center, the Cosmonaut Training Center in Kaliningrad, outside Moscow, will take over the operations of several smaller training centers scattered around Russia.
Russia currently has five cosmonaut training centers, including the Cosmonaut Training Center and another operated by rocket manufacturer Energiya. The Kaliningrad center has about half of the 50 cosmonauts currently in training.
No timetable was given for the consolidation, although some kind of reorganization seemed certain. "It is not clear when exactly it [the plan] will be adopted, but it will be done," Yuri Bogoroditsky, head of the Cosmonaut Training Center's external relations office, said.
G. Porter Bridwell, who has served as director of the Marshall Space Flight Center for the last two years,announced his retirement from NASA Thursday, effective February 3.
Bridwell joined NASA in 1962, four years after beginning his career as an aerospace engineer. During his NASA tenure he was a manager on the Saturn program, headed development of the space shuttles' external tank, and managed all the main propulsion systems for the Space Shuttle while at Marshall.
Bridwell also served as acting director of the Stennis Space Center in 1987, and worked at NASA Headquarters in Washington on the space station redesign team before becoming head of Marshall.
"I've been out here for 38 years, 34 of it with NASA," the sixty-year old Bridwell said Thursday in Huntsville. "It's time for me to go."
An international team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a bright ultraviolet laser beam, several times brighter than the Sun, emanating from a huge unstable star.
Astronomers believe that violent, chaotic eruptions by the star Eta Carinae, 8,000 light-years from the Earth, are responsible for the powerful natural laser.
While infrared lasers have been seen before coming from other stars, this ultraviolet laser, using much more energetic photons than infrared lasers, is unique. "Natural infrared lasers are very rare in space; this ultraviolet laser is even more difficult for nature to arrange, and nothing like it has been seen before," said Kris Davidson of the University of Minnesota.
Davidson led a team of ten astronomers from the U.S., Germany, and Sweden, who used the HST's Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS) to detect the laser.
Radio observations of Mars in the past week have suggested that a planet-wide dust storm may be in progress, but visual observations have failed to confirm the presence of a storm.
Todd Clancy, of the University of Colorado, reported January 5 that radio observations of Mars indicated a higher than normal temperature in Mars's upper atmosphere. Clancy reported a 20 degree Celsius rise in the temperature of the Martian atmosphere 10 to 20 km above the surface. This rise in temperature, according to Clancy, is consistent with global dust storms seen on Mars in 1992 and 1994.
Clancy made his observations using the NRAO 12-m radio telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona.
Visual confirmation of a dust storm was requested, but due to the small angular size of Mars at its current distance from the Earth, and with Mars only 13 degrees from the Sun in the sky, observations were expected to be difficult.
However,Sky and Telescope magazine reported January 12 that astronomers Don Parker and Carlos Hernandez obtained images of Mars which showed no clear evidence for a large dust storm. Their CCD images revealed a number of markings on the planet's surface that would not be visible during a dust storm.
Danger: Falling Meteors: A 19-year-old Japanese student got quite a surprise January 7 while driving around town. The student was driving in the city of Tsukuba, 60 km northeast of Tokyo, when he saw "a rock drop out of the sky in front of his car," according to wire reports. He picked up the rock, which was later examined at Japan's National Science Museum and confirmed to be a meteorite. The meteorite is probably a fragment of a meteor that exploded over central Japan, creating a reddish fireball and loud boom that startled residents throughout the area.
Norm's Newest Challenge: Former astronaut Norman Thagard, who spent last spring as the first American aboard the Russian space station Mir, is facing a new challenge this spring: teaching college students. Last year, Thagard set an American endurance record of 115 days in space. This semester, Thagard, who retired from NASA January 3, will be a visiting professor of engineering at Florida State University and teach engineering classes. Thagard received his bachelors and masters degrees in engineering science from Florida State. "We are pleased to welcome Dr. Thagard home," university president Talbot Sandy D'Alemberte said.
Obituary: General Daniel Graham: Daniel O. Graham, Lieutenant General, U.S. Army (retired), an early supporter of the Single-Stage-to-Orbit vehicle concept, passed away December 31 of cancer. Graham served in the Army for 30 years, becoming deputy director of the CIA and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency before retiring in 1976. After organizing a study which led to the Strategic Defense Initiative, he founded the Space Transportation Association in 1990. The goal of the STA was to support development of vehicles and technologies that would provide economical, dependable access to space. This led to his support of the SSTO concept. In 1995 NASA awarded Graham the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the agency's highest honor. Graham was 70 years old.