NASA has passed on plans to refly a satellite which tumbled out of control and had to be retrieved by two spacewalking astronauts in a quickly planned rescue last Monday.
     The Spartan-201 satellite failed to perform a maneuver after being deployed from the shuttle Columbia's cargo bay Friday November 21 for two days of free-flight observations of the Sun.
     After several minutes passed, the shuttle crew moved to retrieve the malfunctioning satellite. Astronaut Kalpana Chawla tried to latch onto the satellite with the shuttle's robot arm. However, the arm failed to latch onto the satellite and bumped it as it moved away, sending the satellite into a slow spin.
     The crew spent an hour trying to retrieve the satellite, but were unable to get into position to grab the tumbling satellite. After an hour, with shuttle maneuvering fuel reserves low and satellite systems shut down, mission control ordered the crew to suspend their attempts while astronauts and engineers on the ground looked at new options to retrieve the $10-million satellite.
     On Sunday the 23rd NASA gave the crew instructions to retrieve Spartan using a spacewalk already scheduled for Monday evening. Astronauts Winston Scott and Takao Doi would position themselves on opposite sides of the satellite's docking cradle in the cargo bay, while commander Kevin Kregel positioned the shuttle just underneath the satellite. Scott and Doi would then grab onto the satellite and push it into its docking cradle.
     The spacewalk began around 7:15pm EST (0015 UT Nov. 25). After positioning themselves in the cargo bay and waiting an hour for the satellite to drift into position, Scott and Doi simultaneously grabbed the satellite at 9pm EST (0200 UT).
     "Now that we've got it, Mr. Doi, let's decide what we're gonna do with it," Scott said to his partner after they grabbed hold of the satellite.
     The hardest part of the spacewalk turned out to be storing the spacecraft in the cargo bay. The spacewalkers eventually got help from the shuttle's robot arm to lock the satellite into place in its cradle.
     Satellite engineers are still working to understand the cause of the Spartan failure after deployment on the 21st. They do know a timer did not properly initialize, preventing the spacecraft from starting up properly after deployment, but do not know why the timer did not work.
     "All I really know is my spacecraft either didn't get the command it needed or somehow it wasn't sent," Spartan project manager Craig Tooley said. "I'm confident that if we run the software through again and initialize it, we can send that command."
     Both software malfunctions and crew error are being considered as the cause of the failure. Tooley said if the problem can be diagnosed and corrected, the spacecraft likely has enough battery power for a shortened mission. However, citing limited fuel supplies on the shuttle, NASA decided November 30 not to redeploy the satellite.
     The Spartan-201 satellite, making its fourth flight, is a science satellite dedicated to observations of the Sun. It is designed to fly free of the shuttle for several days at a time before returning to Earth with its data. It was to be deployed early Thursday, the 20th, but was delayed because of technical problems with another solar satellite, SOHO, with which it was to coordinate observations.

While the successful retrieval of the tumbling Spartan satellite captured most of the headlines during the shuttle mission, the six-person crew of Columbia has continued experiments on the effects of weightlessness on plants and materials, and performed assembly tests for the International Space Station.
     The STS-87 mission carries the Spacelab module in its cargo bay for the United States Microgravity Payload 4 (USMP-4), a set of experiments to test the effects of weightlessness on materials.
     The USMP-4 payload includes an experiment to test the manufacture of semiconductor crystals in weightlessness and another to test the creation of metallic alloys. Another experiment studies how liquids cool and solidify in the absence of gravity.
     Another experiment, a joint venture between the United States and the Ukraine, studies the growth of plants in weightlessness. The experiment is being monitored by Leonid Kadenyuk, the first Ukrainian to fly on the shuttle.
     Astronauts Winston Scott and Takao Doi were able to perform some of their planned tests during an extended spacewalk Monday the 24th. The two had been scheduled to perform a six-hour spacewalk to test equipment for use in the assembly of the station, but those tests became secondary when they had to retrieve the tumbling Spartan satellite.
     However, because of the relatively easy effort required to grapple the satellite and an extra 90 minutes added onto the spacewalk, Scott and Doi were able to complete most of the objectives of the spacewalk, including testing a crane that would be used to move equipment outside the station during assembly. Tests of a remotely-controlled camera were canceled, though.
     Doi's spacewalk was the first ever for a Japanese astronaut. The spacewalk was televised live throughout Japan.
     The launch of Columbia, on schedule at 2:46pm EST (1946 UT) November 19, was the eighth and last shuttle launch scheduled for 1997. For the first time, all eight launches took place on the day they were scheduled to occur.
     "It's quite an accomplishment for this team to have eight on-time launches," shuttle launch director Jim Harrington said at a post-launch press conference. "The team did a fantastic job this year."
     Columbia is scheduled to land on the morning of December 5. That lading may be delayed by one day, though, if NASA approves the redeployment of the Spartan-201 satellite, which could require another spacewalk to retrieve it.

A set of spacewalks scheduled outside the Russian space station Mir in December, including one by American David Wolf, have been postponed until January to give the crew more time to prepare.
     Officials at Russian mission control announced November 25 that a spacewalk by Wolf and Anatoly Solovyov, originally scheduled for December 5, had been delayed to January 9. The spacewalk was to expected to be pushed back by a month, but several extra days were added to accommodate another spacewalk January 5.
     On that spacewalk Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov will replace the hatch on the exterior of the Kvant-2 module. The hatch failed to seal properly after a set of spacewalks in early November, and cosmonauts noticed an unidentified white residue on the seal of the hatch at that time.
     Wolf and Solovyov plan to retrieve scientific equipment attached to the hull of Mir during their January 9 spacewalk.
     Russian officials said the delay in the spacewalk was designed to give Wolf a chance to clear a "huge backlog" of experiments on the station, caused by problems on the station through much of the year.
     Wolf is scheduled to be picked up by the shuttle Endeavour in mid-January, so any further delays in the spacewalk would likely prevent Wolf from taking part.
     In a separate development, Russian officials reported that the main computer on Mir failed on the weekend of November 22, shutting down power to the station.
     The crew replaced the computer with a backup version by the morning of Sunday, November 23, and the station returned to normal by Monday.
     Unlike previous failures, the Mir computer troubles were not publicized by Russian officials until after the situation returned to normal. Officials blamed the failure on the age of the replacement computer, which was sent to the station in October, claiming it had been overused before sending it into space.

A joint American-Japanese satellite designed to measure rainfall in tropical regions of the globe was launched Thanksgiving Day after several delays.
     The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) lifted off Thursday at 4:27pm EST (2127 UT) on an H-2 rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan.
     The TRMM spacecraft carries a suite of instruments, including cameras, microwave detectors, and a radar to measure the amount of precipitation falling from storms in the tropical regions of the planet. Climatologists have in the past only estimated these amounts, due to the lack of weather stations in the tropics, especially in the oceans.
     Scientists hope the data that TRMM will provide during its three-year mission data that can be used to better understand the weather systems of the planet, from phenomena like El Nino to measurements of global warming.
     The satellite is a joint U.S.-Japan effort. NASA provided the spacecraft and most of the instruments it carries, while the Japanese space agency NASDA provided one of the spacecraft's instruments, a radar, and the H-2 launch vehicle.
     The rocket also carried into orbit ETS-7, a Japanese experimental satellite. ETS-7 consists of a large main bus and a separate small "target" satellite. The two will separate to distances ranging from a few meters to several kilometers to test docking techniques.

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope released November 20 show evidence of new clouds in the atmosphere of Uranus and give a new look at Jupiter and its tenuous ring.
     Hubble used its Wide Field/Planetary Camera (WFPC-2) and its NICMOS infrared camera to image Uranus in late July and early August. The images show a pattern of clouds in Uranus's atmosphere, including the first clouds seen in the planet's northern hemisphere this century.
     Because the planet's rotational axis is tipped on its side by more than 90 degrees, seasons on Uranus last more than 20 years, one-fourth of its 84-year orbit around the Sun. The northern hemisphere of the planet is just coming out of a 20-year winter where it saw very little of the Sun.
     Uranus gained a reputation as a "bland" world after the Voyager 2 flyby in 1986, when the spacecraft returned images of a uniform planet with little evidence of banding or clouds in its atmosphere. Images taken since then have shown some evidence of clouds in the planet's southern hemisphere.
     The infrared images also captured eight of the 10 small moons orbiting Uranus discovered by Voyager 2. The smallest of the eight, including Bianca, 40 km (25 mi.) in diameter, had not been seen since the 1986 flyby.
     The NICMOS camera has also provided new images of Jupiter's upper atmosphere. The images provide the first look at high-altitude clouds on the planet, which have not been seen before since lower-altitude clouds reflect more light.
     The images also captured an edge-on view of Jupiter's ring system and the small inner moon of Metis.

NASA announced a new crew rotation for the International Space Station on November 17, and for the first time Russian cosmonauts will assume the role of station commander on some occasions.
     The first crew for the station, scheduled to launch in early 1999, is unchanged from earlier announcements. The commander will be American astronaut William Shepherd, with Russian crewmates Yuri Gidzenko, the Soyuz vehicle commander, and flight engineer Sergei Krikalev.
     The second crew, scheduled to arrive in mid-1999, will be commanded by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev, with astronauts James S. Voss and Susan J. Helms. American Kenneth D. Bowersox will command the third crew, with cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and rookie Mikhail Turin. They will fly to the station in late 1999 for only a two-month mission.
     The final crew will be commanded by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Onufrienko with American crewmates Carl E. Walz and Daniel Bursch. They are scheduled to arrive at the station in early 2000.
     The first and third crews will fly to the station in Soyuz spacecraft and return on shuttles. The second and fourth crews will arrive at the station on shuttles, Atlantis for the second crew and Discovery for the fourth, and return in Soyuz capsules.
     The third crew will serve as backups for the first crew, and the fourth crew will backup the second, NASA announced.
     "This is an historic step in the evolution of the International Space Station," station manager Randy Brinkley said. "These assignments are a clear indication of the maturity of the space station and the exciting reality that the ISS will soon be operational."

In a sign that the heavy-lift Ariane 5 launch vehicle was moving towards commercial operations, the European Space Agency turned over the launch facilities it constructed in Kourou, French Guiana, to the French firm Arianespace November 25.
     The 800-million ECU ($898-million) ELA-3 launch facility was built by the French space agency CNES for the development and first two launches of the Ariane 5. ESA had been working with Arianespace for some time prior to the handover to ensure a smooth transition.
     The handover comes less than a month after the second test flight of the large booster. The Ariane 502 launch placed two test satellites into Earth orbit, although a premature shutdown of a rocket engine meant the satellites were placed in a lower orbit than intended.
     The launch was still a success compared to the maiden flight of the Ariane 5 in June 1996. A failure in a guidance system computer sent the rocket careening off-course less than 40 seconds after launch, forcing launch controllers to destroy it.
     Arianespace, which got a similar handover of Ariane 4 launch facilities from ESA in the 1980s, plans to use ELA-3 to launch 8-10 Ariane 5 boosters a year once the rocket enters commercial use.

A thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an early Mars could have kept temperatures warm enough to support liquid water, and perhaps life, on its surface, scientists reported last month.
     In an article in the November 14 issue of the journal Science, Francois Forget of the University of Jussieu, in Paris, and Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago found that a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere could keep temperatures warm enough for liquid water at distances from the Sun grater than originally thought.
     According to their work, even a planet filled with clouds of dry ice, solid carbon dioxide, would allow enough light to reach the surface which, then converted to heat, would be trapped in the atmosphere in by the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat would warm the planet to the point where liquid water would be stable on the surface.
     "The conditions on early Mars -- some four billion years ago -- were a little more like the conditions at the bottom of the ocean than like a rainforest," explained Pierrehumbert. "It would have been dark, warm enough for liquid water, but without a large energy source for photosynthesis."
     Under previous theories, liquid water could not exist on planets more than 204 million kilometers (127 million miles) from the Sun. Forget and Pierrehumbert's work pushed the limit out to 357 million kilometers (223 million miles), well beyond the orbit of Mars.
     The findings also aid in the search of life outside our solar system, explained James Kasting of Penn State. The findings extend the range of habitability around stars, making it more likely to find worlds where life, including intelligent life, could exist.

An international team of scientists have found evidence which suggests a large asteroid struck the Earth near present-day Antarctica over two million years ago.
     Geologists believe the large asteroid struck the Bellingshausen Sea, between Antarctica and South America, with the force of 100,000 megatons of TNT. Such an explosion would have generated tsunami waves between 20 and 40 meters (65 to 130 feet) high, swamping coastlines thousands of kilometers away.
     The blast, which would have left a crater 15 to 40 km (9 to 25 mi.) wide on land, left no trace of the impact in the ocean or on the seabed. Scientists dated the blast from deep-sea and seismic surveys of the region performed by a German research ship.
     The impact may explain why marine fossils have been found in the upper slopes of mountains in Antarctica. The explosion would have lifted plants and animals into a vapor cloud, later depositing them on the mountain slopes.
     The timing of the impact also coincides with a "strong cooling event" during the late Pliocene ice age. German researcher Rainer Gersonde noted that there may be a link to the two events.
     The asteroid that caused the impact, estimated to be between 1 and 4 km (0.6 to 2.4 mi.) in diameter, has been dubbed Eltainin by the researchers, after a 1960s U.S. research vessel.

NASA Budget Woes: Recent reports indicate that NASA's proposed budget for fiscal year 1999 may be cut to $12.6 billion, a cut of about $1 billion from its 1998 budget. The proposed budget is expected to keep the space station and shuttle intact, but enact deep cuts in aeronautics and space science, including NASA's Origins program. Such a budget, which would not be released until after the first of the year, would likely be sharply criticized in the House, where more than 200 members have signed a letter calling for increased funding for the space agency.

747 Flight Investigation: NASA and the United Space Alliance are investigating why the shuttle Atlantis was not properly attached to its 747 carrier aircraft for a cross-country flight in November. Washers for two bolts that secure the orbiter to the 747 were missing, causing minor damage to the bolts during the flight. There is no evidence there was any danger to the shuttle during the flight, though. Atlantis left Florida on a multi-day, cross-country flight November 11. The plane ferried Atlantis to Palmdale, California, where the orbiter will undergo a refit, including a modified airlock and new cockpit controls.

R-Prize Announced: The National Space Society has announced a prize for amateur rocket flights into space. The "R-Prize" will award $10,000 to the first group to launch a rocket above 50 nautical miles, considered as the boundary of space. The award comes on the heels of the Space Frontier Foundation's Cheap Access To Space (CATS) prize, which will award $250,000 to the first 2 kg payload to go above 200 km altitude, although planning for the R-Prize had been in the works for several months.

Bureaucrat Launch: A Russian bureaucrat is on track to make a one-week trip to Mir next year. Sergei Baturin, an advisor to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, is expected to be named to a relief crew set to launch in August 1998. Baturin would stay on Mir for a week to 10 days before returning with the old crew. The 48-year-old advisor's tasks on the station have not been specified, but one report suggested he would complete a detailed report on the station for Yeltsin.

Thanksgiving in Space: For the second consecutive year, an American shuttle crew and an American astronaut on Mir marked the Thanksgiving holiday. The crew of the Columbia enjoyed a dinner which included Dinty Moore American Classic turkey dinners, purchased for $1.99 each from a Houston supermarket, although Ukrainian astronaut eschewed the frozen dinners in favor of steak. David Wolf and his Mir crewmates enjoyed smoked turkey, dehydrated mashed potatoes, corn and peas for Thanksgiving. "I'm kind of missing those sweet potatoes with the marshmallow on top, but we're going to do a pretty good job of it here," Wolf quipped.

In Brief: NASA's Johnson Space Center may have failed, at least temporarily, its ISO-9000 qualification, according to reports published by Keith Cowing's NASA Watch. The qualification, which other NASA centers have, ensures that the center has a system for quality assurance in place... Mir cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov won't be home for the holidays, but they've already done their Christmas shopping, thanks to Cambridge, Mass.-based Virtual Emporium, an online shopping center. What's better is that the merchants in the emporium gave away the gifts for free as part of the heavily-promoted event. Energia, Ltd. also announced you can send holiday greeting to the cosmonauts at solovyev.mir@energialtd.com and vinogradov.mir@energialtd.com... Speaking of which, "Sure, some men excel at giving inspired presents to the women in their lives. Some men have also walked on the moon -- but not many of them, and not lately," gripes Claire McHugh, editor of the men's magazine Maxim in its November/December issue. "When it comes to gift giving, most men are like those other flyboys, the ones on the Mir space station, fumbling around and making excuses." Well, since Mir is in much better shape now than it was just this summer, I guess that means there is still hope for men for this holiday shopping season...