From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.space.news
Subject: space news from Feb 17 AW&ST
Date: 16 Apr 92 03:12:39 GMT
Article-I.D.: zoo.1992Apr16.031239.21709
Followup-To: sci.space
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
To: sci-space-news@news.arc.nasa.gov

ERS-1 radar image commercial marketing is sorted out:  Eurimage (a
consortium of European companies) will be prime contractor, with
Radarsat International handling sales in the US and Canada, Eurimage
itself doing them for Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and
Spot Image covering the rest of the world.

Turf battle underway between Quayle and James Baker (Secy of State):
State is obstructing NASA's attempts at cooperation with the Russian
space program, ostensibly on grounds of technology transfer but mostly
actually because Baker wants the 1996 presidential nomination and
doesn't want Quayle to look good.

Quayle's office unveils the new plan for Landsat:  joint management
by NASA and DoD and construction of Landsat 7.

NPO Energia is about to open a US office, and it's pretty obvious who
they think their most promising customer is:  they're locating in
Herndon VA, practically next door to Space Station HQ in Reston.

Truly is fired effective April 1.  The White House wants to make major
changes in NASA management and start getting some action on Moon/Mars,
plus shifting more management authority to the Space Council.  The
last straw was that NASA is still without a deputy Administrator, and
the feeling is that Truly is the main reason -- potential candidates
won't take the job because Truly won't delegate authority.  (The normal
practice is that the deputy runs NASA and the Administrator himself
handles politics, but Truly has been doing both.)  The timing is bad,
with a budget battle over the space station on the horizon.

The White House's NASA-shakeup plan basically comes from Lowell Wood
at LLNL.  Apart from much greater Space Council involvement, it also
calls for many fewer management layers, firm incentives to keep programs
on schedule and budget (with likelihood of cancellation if either slips
very much), much more delegation of design decisions to contractors,
and ceilings on administrative overheads.

USAF uses Spot Image pictures as a primary navigation aid for relief
flights into Russia, both as raw data and as input to simulators that
show the approach-eye view.  Many of the airfields being used have
poor navigation aids and rather more nearby obstructions than US
authorities would allow.  Landsat images are not detailed enough and
spysat pictures have too narrow a field of view.

Japanese controllers have a problem:  JERS-1's radar antenna has not
opened properly.

Pentagon is lukewarm about SDIO's interest in Russian antimissile
technology:  they see it as encouraging the survival of military technical
expertise that they'd rather see dispersed, and also taking work away
from US contractors during already-lean times.

Data from UARS and NASA aircraft show substantial ozone losses over
the Northern Hemisphere.

Set of survey articles on NASA aircraft operations, including one on
Dryden.  The NB-52B celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, but
has only 2500 flight hours and will be in business for years to come;
it's slated to fly the third Pegasus launch soon, and is likely to
be used for drop tests of the space-station lifeboat.  Two almost
equally old F-104s are still around, with one active project looking
at using them to simulate landings by vehicles with poor cockpit
visibility, i.e. NASP.  The Convair 990 is being rebuilt with a
shuttle main landing gear between its own main gear, to permit the
first (!) full-scale test program on the shuttle tires and brakes.
And, as mentioned earlier, the SR-71s are being eyed for external-burning
tests for NASP.

USAF Tactical Air Command and SDIO are examining speeding up detection
and impact-point prediction for tactical ballistic missiles.  Also the
subject of joint studies is the possibility of using AMRAAM as a boost-
phase interceptor against TBMs.

USAF schedules a November Pegasus launch for the Photovoltaic Array Space
Power Plus Diagnostics satellite, a small satellite investigating effects
of radiation and near-Earth plasma conduction on solar arrays.

First military Atlas 2 launch Feb 10, carrying a DSCS 3 military comsat.
This launch slipped repeatedly due to various accidents, technical problems,
and weather delays.  The USAF was starting to feel some urgency, because
a lot of its communications are still being handled by aging DSCS 2s.  The
launch called for two burns by Centaur, the second being the 300th space
firing of the RL10 engine.  Among the complications of the launch was a
seven-minute "window closed" period when the ascent path would have passed
too close to Mir.

Ulysses completes its Jupiter flyby and is now in its final orbit.  Quite
a bit of data on Jupiter's magnetosphere was obtained and is still being
analyzed.  Major results so far include the discovery of "hot spots" in
the Io plasma torus, lower electron density in the torus (which hints
that Io's volcanic activity is rather lower than ten years ago), a very
disordered magnetosphere in the dusk sector (previously unexplored), and
a generally larger magnetosphere than that seen by Pioneer or Voyager.
Ulysses is in good shape and fuel consumption so far is lower than expected,
which might permit an extended mission.
-- 
ISDN, n:  Incredibly Slow and Dumb      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
Networking                              |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry