Dec 14 1976
From The Space Library
NASA announced selection of three contractors to negotiate for provision of various subsystems for the Solar Maximum Mission spacecraft. The SMM, scheduled for launch in the third quarter of 1979, would carry instruments to investigate solar flares; the spacecraft would be built on the modular concept, so that its instrumentation could be readily changed or replaced.
Fairchild Industries, Germantown, Md., would negotiate to provide the communications and data-handling subsystem at a proposed value of $2.5 million, for one protoflight model with options for up to six additional. The C& DH subsystem would provide ground and onboard control of all spacecraft and sensor functions, and of retrieval of housekeeping and experiment data.
McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co., East St. Louis, Mo., would negotiate to provide the power module subsystem for the SMM at a proposed value of $2.3 million, with options for up to six additional. The power module, an' unregulated system operating from a deployable solar array, would provide 1280 kw at the beginning of its operating life.
General Electric Space Div., Valley Forge, Pa., would negotiate to provide the attitude-control subsystem at a proposed value of $3.5 million, with options for up to six additional subsystems. The ACS would include reaction-control devices as well as a high-performance gyro inertial-reference unit, a pair of fixed electronic-scanning star trackers, a three-axis magnetometer set, and sun sensors.
The SMM spacecraft, a 381-cm-long cylinder weighing about 1740 kg, would be powered with solar panels and fit atop a modular spacecraft base; it would be capable of--launch on a Delta and retrieval by the Space Shuttle. (NASA Releases 76-203, 76-204, 76-205)
MSFC announced the successful launch on a Black Brant VC research rocket at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., of the first containerless experiments in materials processing ever attempted on a spacecraft. NASA's third space-processing applications rocket, SPAR III, carried a five experiment payload, two of these using acoustic and electromagnetic suspension devices, or levitators. Materials suspended in a levitator could be melted and resolidified without touching a container, resulting in a degree of purity never before achieved in high-temperature processing, as the melt in a conventional container would be contaminated to some extent by the container itself. The rocket flight provided about 5 min of near-weightlessness for performance of the experiments, which were recovered by parachute for experimenter analysis. Experimenters were Charles Schafer, MSFC; Jerry ouch, GE; Dr. John Papazian, Grumman Aerospace Corp.; Dr. David Lind, Rockwell Intl. Science Center; and Dr. Donald R. Uhlmann, MIT. Conclusions as to the success of containerless processing would await analysis of telemetry, inflight film, and experiment results. (MSFC Releases 76-207, 76-212)
The USSR Ministry of Higher and Specialized Secondary Education had announced plans to build an Institute of Nuclear Energetics at Obninsk, in central Russia, site of the "world's first industrial atomic power station," the Tass news agency reported. First Soviet educational institution of this type, the new center would train engineers in design and use of nuclear power stations. In accordance with a new program of constructing nuclear power stations, Tass said the present 6-million-kw capacity would be supplemented by an additional 13 to 15 million kw; new stations were being built at Kursk, Smolensk, Kalinin in central Russia, and in the southern Ukraine. The Obninsk center would be the 860th higher education institution in the USSR, Tass noted. (FBIS, Tass in English, 14 Dec 76)
Dr. Donald H. Menzel, one of the world's leading authorities on the sun and its corona, died at Mass. General Hospital after a long illness. During his lifetime, he had viewed 15 total solar eclipses, leading expeditions to distant places like the Sahara (1973) and Siberia (1936), where the Soviets provided a parlor car of the Trans Siberian Railroad for his equipment and camping gear. Dr. Menzel had taught for nearly 40 yr at Harvard; Dr. Fred L. Whipple of Harvard, a colleague and former student of Dr. Menzel, noted that many of the best-known astronomers in the U.S. had also been taught by Dr. Menzel. The Minor Planet Center of the Intl. Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid Menzel in recognition of his contribution to astrophysics. In 1938, Dr. Menzel developed the first coronagraph in the U.S. to permit study of the sun's corona without an eclipse; in 1933, he had collaborated with J.C. Boyce in establishing the presence of oxygen in the solar corona, and in 1941 he had worked with Winfield W. Salisbury on the initial calculations that enabled the first radio contact with the moon in 1946. He had received a Ph.D. in astrophysics at Princeton in 1924, writing science-fiction stories to help pay his expenses, and had taught at the Univ. of Iowa and Ohio State Univ. before becoming professor of astrophysics at Harvard in 1939. He was director of the Harvard College Observatory from 1954 to 1966, when he was named research scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory in Cambridge. He had retired from the university in 1971, but had continued to do research there. (NYT, 16 Dec 76, 50)
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