Dec 20 1999
From The Space Library
A Taurus rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, carrying satellites for NASA and the Korean Aerospace Institute, as well as 36 capsules holding 7 ounces of cremated remains for Celestis Inc., a Houston-based company that arranged to send human remains to space. NASA's 253-pound (114.8-kilogram) Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor (EOS ACRIM III),
expected to return data for a minimum of five years, was deployed to measure sunlight reaching Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land, data needed for scientists to study whether slight changes in solar output affected global warming and cooling. ACRIM III was the third in a series of long-term, solar-monitoring tolls that NASA's JPL had built. ACRIM III's data would expand the database begun with the ACRIM I mission in 1980, aboard the Solar Maximum Mission spacecraft, and continued with the ACRIM II mission in 1991, aboard the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite. ACRIM I was the first instrument to demonstrate clearly that the total radiant energy from the Sun is not a constant. The Korean satellite, built by TRW Inc. for a three-year mission, carried three instruments for creating digital elevation maps of Korea, studying the biology of the ocean, and performing physics experiments on the effects of radiation on electronics. The Celestis mission carried 36 capsules of human remains, which would orbit for 45 years before burning up in Earth's atmosphere.
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