Dec 17 1976
From The Space Library
Space News for this day. (1MB PDF)
Dr. Michael Duke, curator of lunar samples at NASA's Johnson Space Center, returned from Moscow with two half-gram samples of moon soil brought to earth in Aug. 1976 by the USSR's Luna 24 spacecraft. The samples were part of a 2-meter-long core of lunar material obtained by a hollow drill from the surface of Mare Crisium, a region of the moon from which the U.S. had not had any samples. This was the third time U.S. scientists had obtained a Soviet sample in exchange for material collected by Apollo astronauts from other places on the moon. Other members of the U.S. scientific delegation to Moscow this week were Dr. Charles Simonds, Lunar Science Institute, Houston, Tex., and Prof. Gerald J. Wasserburg of the Calif. Institute of Technology. The small size of the sample would not detract from its usefulness, according to Dr. Bevan French, chief of NASA's program of research on extraterrestrial materials; methods routinely used for extracting information from samples of meteorite or deep-sea basalt could produce hundreds of chemical analyses from a single tiny crystal or determine the age of a fragment smaller than an aspirin tablet. (JSC Release 76-75)
NASA announced selection of United Space Boosters, Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., as assembly contractor for the Space Shuttle solid-fuel booster rocket. USBI, a wholly owned subsidiary of United Technologies Corp., received a cost-plus-award fee contract for $122 million, to cover six design, development, and test and evaluation flights up to March 1980, with options for 21 operational flights extending into 1982. The contract would cover all booster assembly activities at MSFC and KSC; MSFC would supervise assembly, checkout, and refurbishment of the boosters, and KSC would supervise final assembly, checkout, launch operations, and postlaunch disassembly of the boosters. First of six orbital test flights had been scheduled for the second quarter of 1979, with operational flights to begin in 1980. At launch, the three main engines and two boosters of the Space Shuttle would operate together; upon burnout at about 43 km altitude, the boosters would separate and descend by parachute to the ocean for retrieval and refurbishment. The boosters were designed for use 20 times. (NASA Release 76-212; MSFC Release 76-215; WSJ, 21 Dec 76, 11)
The Concorde supersonic airliner, making regularly scheduled flights between London, Paris, and the Dulles airport outside Washington, D.C. since 24 May, had been lending its distinctive sonic waves to atmospheric research by Columbia Univ. monitors, the New York Times reported. Dr. William L. Donn, senior research associate at Columbia's Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory, and his colleagues Nambath Balachandran and David Rind had derived surprising data on daily variations in the supposed prevailing winds in the upper atmosphere, and were anticipating new data on dispersal of atmospheric pollutants and the content of the rarefied reaches of earth's atmosphere. The sound waves, inaudible to the human ear but detectable by sensitive microphones registering changes in air pressure, contained atmospheric information up to as far as 120-km altitude, through reflection from the thermosphere. Precise knowledge of the Concorde's elevation and location along its flight path had aided in interpreting data on atmospheric temperatures and wind conditions depending on the exact strength and path of the sound waves, Dr. Donn said. (NYT, 17 Dec 76, A-18)
A British Aircraft Corp. team had successfully launched the second of a series of Skylark 12 high-altitude research rockets from the Andoya Range in arctic Norway to investigate auroral activity for the U.K. Science Research Council and other groups investigating the intense phenomena above the Arctic Circle, the London Press Assn. reported in a broadcast. The rocket reached an altitude of more than 680 km, sending scientific data to ground receivers for 14 min of the flight. First launch of the new three-stage Skylark, capable of carrying payloads to three times the altitude of earlier versions, took place 21 Nov. (FBIS, London Press Assn., 17 Dec 76)
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