Dec 17 1999
From The Space Library
Space News for this day. (6MB PDF)
NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin named A. Thomas Young to chair the Mars Program Independent Assessment Team, charged with reviewing NASA's approach to robotic exploration of Mars following the recent loss of the Mars Polar Lander Mission. Among the review team's tasks were the evaluation of several recent NASA missions to deep space, including Mars Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander, Deep Space 1, and Deep Space 2. The team would analyze the projects' budgets, content, schedule, management structure, and scientific organization, assessing how roles and responsibilities of those missions related to the missions' safety, reliability, and success.
At the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco, NASA presented images from the Galileo spacecraft's close flyby of Jupiter's moon Io on 25 November, showing "a curtain of lava erupting within a giant volcanic crater." Because of the intense heat and height of the lava fountains, NASA's Infrared Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, was also able to observe them. NASA scientists hoped to determine the temperature of the extremely hot lava on Io, by combining data from the telescope and from Galileo observations. Galileo scientist Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson remarked that capturing images of the fountains was a 1-in-500-chance observation. NASA announced that engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL's) Measurement Technology Center had been able to repair images damaged by radiation during Galileo's 10 October flyby using LabVIEW software from National Instruments. JPL's Torrence V. Johnson compared the work to unscrambling a television cable signal: "JPL engineers had to break the code that was inadvertently introduced by the radiation near Io.”
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