From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: space news from July 20 AW&ST
To: sci-space-news@news.arc.nasa.gov
Followup-To: sci.space
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 03:35:46 GMT

[You may have noticed :-) that it's been a while since one of these
appeared.  My life was chaotic for a while in spring, and lots of things
have taken a while to settle down again.  This issue seemed like an
auspicious place to start again.  (If you don't know the significance
of the date, you clearly don't qualify for Space Cadet First Class,
or Second Class for that matter.)  I do hope to catch up with the
missed ones for the sake of completeness, but it may be a while.]

The cover story this time is the Tethered Satellite flight.

Baikonur Cosmodrome is no more -- it's Tyuratam Cosmodrome now.  It was
always located at Tyuratam; naming it after a village a couple of hundred
kilometers away was a piece of disinformation.  Kazakhstan has now done
away with this.  Kazakhstan is also in the midst of negotiations with
Russia about how much Russia is going to pay for use of Tyuratam.

Atlantis is the orbiter tentatively picked to get a Russian docking system
for missions to Mir.  The system would be installed while Atlantis is at
Palmdale for its mid-life overhaul, scheduled to start after the Tethered
Satellite mission.  (The overhaul will include the usual set of upgrades
including better computers and the drag chute, plus extended-duration
mods, as well.)

ISAS is now talking about postponing the M-5 launcher's debut for about
a year.  Reportedly, early chamber tests by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
have not gone well.

NASA exercises the third of four three-year options to extend Lockheed's
contract for shuttle processing at KSC, giving Lockheed the job at least
until 1995.

Two Russian SPT-100 electric thrusters are delivered to Space Systems/Loral
for tests.  Several US government agencies are interested, and there are
plans to offer the thrusters commercially for comsat stationkeeping.

Harrison Storms, president of Rockwell's space group when it was building
the Apollo command module and Saturn V second stage, dies July 11.

Martin Faga, USAF asst-sec for space, joins the US interagency group
visiting Russia (which also includes Goldin and the head of the NSC staff).

P&W starts ignition tests of the RL10 variant for DC-X.  The tests will
run about four weeks and will include calibration runs for throttling.

Big article on the Tethered Satellite project.  This actually isn't the
first test of tethers in space -- that was done on Gemini -- but it's
the first test of long ones.  [I'll skip most of the technical details
since they're either old news or rendered irrelevant by the partial
failure.]  The main concern is instabilities and vibrations of various
kinds, although the system is large enough that such problems should be
very slow and easy to deal with.  The mechanical properties are thought
to be fairly well understood [famous last words]; the electrical
phenomena are not.  The TSS satellite itself was repainted only last
month with a new electrically-conductive paint because aging tests on
the original paint formulation were not entirely satisfactory.  Future
plans include [well, included...] a possible reflight within two years
for longer duration and more electrodynamic investigations, an upper-
atmosphere mission with a 100km tether and fins on the satellite, and
a late-1990s mission that could do the equivalent of hypersonic wind-
tunnel testing by lowering a satellite to 90-100km altitude; NASA has
not yet committed to any of these.

The other big news on mission 46 is Eureca, the European Retrievable
Carrier, which will be left in orbit for pickup by (tentatively)
mission 57 in April.  It carries a load of microgravity experiments
plus some minor technology projects, notably an RF-ionization electric
thruster and equipment to experiment with relaying data through the
Olympus comsat.  There is a great deal of interest in further Eureca
missions, since 6-9 months of very quiet microgravity is hard to come
by otherwise.  ESA is committed to flying it at least once more, and
would like to see more missions, preferably joint projects with NASA
so that ESA wouldn't have to pay for the launches and retrievals.

Deutsche Aerospace and Alenia set up the industrial consortium for
Columbus, slightly shrunken and rearranged by the decision to postpone
Europe's independent free-flyer lab indefinitely and concentrate on
the space-station module exclusively.  The companies have not given
up on free-flyers, and have suggested that ESA contribute a module
to a Mir replacement.

Engineers consider small design changes to Hercules's new Titan SRB.
Preliminary date from the successful test June 12 shows slightly lower
performance than expected.  The design changes to prevent a repetition
of the 1991 explosion were successful.  (They were small enough that
Thiokol and NASA took a hard look at the shuttle SRB design to see
whether it could experience a similar failure.  The answer appears to
be "no".)

France issues production contract for Cerise, a microsatellite based
on the UoSAT bus plus deployable solar arrays, to investigate the
"man-made radioelectric environment" as a precursor to France's Xenon
eavesdropping satellite.

Geotail, a Japanese/US magnetospheric-science satellite, prepares for
launch on a Delta from the Cape.  Geotail will do two lunar flybys to
put it into its initial science orbit, with a perigee of 51000km and
an apogee of 1403000km, the apogee being "downstream" of Earth in
Earth's magnetic tail.  The apogee will eventually be lowered to get
a look at less-distant parts of the tail.  This is mostly a Japanese
mission, with the US supplying the launch and two of the seven experiments.
Mission control will be at ISAS.  The second stage of the Delta will
also carry a diffuse-ultraviolet spectroscopy experiment.

SDIO and LLNL are talking to the Russians about buying some of their
high-energy laser technology [!!], with an eye on aircraft-based lasers
for boost-phase interception of tactical missiles.  The Russians are
considered well ahead of the US in atmospheric propagation and beam
quality, although their lasers themselves are relatively inefficient.

First neutron image of an astronomical object, as Compton's Comptel
instrument images the June 15 solar flare.

Giotto successfully encounters comet Grigg-Skjellerup, with miss distance
estimated at 200km.  There were various surprises in the science data; G-S
was generally much more active than expected.  Giotto, flying almost
sideways to keep its high-gain antenna pointed at Earth, recorded three
major dust impacts but appears to have taken no significant damage.
Afterward, most of its remaining fuel was expended to set it up for
another Earth flyby in 1999, with the possibility of a third comet
encounter if the aging spacecraft is still working well.
-- 
There is nothing wrong with making      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
mistakes, but... make *new* ones. -D.Sim|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: sci.space.news