Dec 2 1985
From The Space Library
A Federal grand jury today indicted General Dynamics Corp., three of its current executives, and its former executive vice president, James Beggs, currently Administrator of NASA, for allegedly seeking to defraud the Defense Department in connection with producing two prototypes of the DIVAD, an anti-aircraft gun for the Army, Time magazine reported.
The seven-count, 33-page indictment stated that between January 1978 and August 1981, while General Dynamics was working on a $41 million program to build the prototypes, it made false statements to the government and was guilty of fraud. The indictment charged the company with illegally billing $Z5 million of its expenses to other government accounts, of which $3.2 million was paid. Along with Beggs, the indictment also named Ralph Hawes, division general manager; David McPherson, program director; and James Hansen, assistant director.
Beggs, who took a leave of absence from NASA, denied the charge, saying, “I have not been involved in any criminal wrongdoing . . . I do not intend to leave, and this is not the first step to a resignation.” A General Dynamics spokesman said, “The issue is a highly sophisticated regulatory and accounting matter, which should be resolved in a civil forum, not in a criminal case.” (Time, Dec 16/85, 46)
The Navy anticipated a series of NROSS satellites with enough launches to keep an operating satellite in orbit unless sensor or other changes made faster launches desirable. NROSS-1's expected lifetime would be three years; an NROSS-2 would depend on needed oceanographic data. The system would help battle group commanders predict ocean conditions for antisubmarine warfare operations, force placement, and plan use of advanced weapon systems. (A/D, Jan 10/85, 50)
In their last full day aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission 51-B, the crew concluded an array of experiments and prepared for their scheduled landing at Edwards Air Force Base, the NY Times reported. Answering questions radioed from reporters at Johnson Space Flight Center, the astronauts reported progress not only in working out space station construction techniques, but also in developing a gravity-free pharmaceutical factory to be based on the proposed space station.
Payload specialist Charles Walker of the McDonnell Douglas Corp. was in charge of the experiment for development of a space-based factory for purification of a human hormone produced by genetically engineered bacteria. Astronauts on previous flights had tested the basic purification technique, called continuous-flow electrophoresis in a gravity-free environment; the current experiment simulated an actual production run of the hormone, which might prove useful in treating certain forms of anemia.
During the questioning, astronauts Lt. Col. Sherwood Spring and Maj. Jerry Ross acknowledged that they were extremely fatigued after each of their spacewalks and that their hands were stiff and numb after the practice assembly, manipulation, and disassembly of a 45-foot-long truss and a pyramidal module. Nevertheless, the two deemed the exercise a success. “We don't know yet what this will mean for a future space station,” Spring commented, “but it's a start. Personally, it was really exhilarating for me out there, face to face with the universe.” (NYT, Dec 3/85, C3)
NASA announced the appointment effective November 25 of Joseph Alexander to deputy chief scientist with responsibility for providing assistance to the chief scientist in advising the Administrator and in establishing policy related to scientific aspects of NASA programs and missions.
Alexander joined Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in 1962, where he participated in the establishment of NASA's program in space radio astronomy and conducted studies of the sun, the planets, and the galaxy from earth-orbit, lunar-orbit, and planetary flyby spacecraft. In 1970 he became head of the Galactic Studies Section where he was responsible for scientific studies associated with the Radio Astronomy Explorer satellite program. Following leave as a visiting scientist at the Department of Astro-Geophysics at the University of Colorado, Alexander became head of the Planetary Magnetospheres Branch and directed a research team conducting both experimental and theoretical studies of planetary environments by using instruments on board spacecraft such as the Interplanetary Monitoring Probes, Mariner-10, Magsat, Pioneer-11, and Voyager 1 and 2.
From January 1984 until March 1985, Alexander was a senior policy analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy where he concentrated on issues related to space science and technology in the civil space program. He then returned to GSFC as associate chief of the laboratory for extraterrestrial physics.
A member of the American Geophysical Union, the U.S. National Committee of the International Union of Radio Science, and the International Astronomical Union, Alexander received in 1960 a B.S. degree and in 1962 an M.A. degree, both in physics, from the College of William and Mary. (NASA anno., Dec 2/85)
NASA issued a revision of its October 28 report on the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) [see Astronomy, Oct. 28], in which it noted a major IRAS survey discovery that many galaxies emitted far more energy in the infrared than in the optical band where normal stars emitted the bulk of their luminosity.
Astronomers considered these galaxies to be of three distinct kinds. The first was “starburst galaxies,” those that were presumably undergoing an active period of star formation leading to a large infrared luminosity and in which as much as 10 to 20 solar masses of gas and dust were being converted into new massive stars each year.
Another class was sometimes called Seyfert galaxies, which astronomers believed were powered by matter falling into an accretion disk surrounding a black hole. The active regions of these galaxies had a great deal of interstellar dust, which absorbed the optical and ultraviolet radiation from the accretion disks, accounting for the large infrared luminosity.
The third and most mysterious class of extragalactic objects discovered by IRAS was the extremely luminous infrared galaxies corresponding to very faint optical galaxies. Such galaxies produced 100 to 300 times as much energy in the infrared as in the optical, and the total luminosities of these galaxies were approximately 100 times those of ours. Astronomers believed the infrared radiation in these galaxies was probably from thermal dust emission, where the dust was reradiating energy absorbed from shorter wavelengths.
Astronomers found a large fraction of the active infrared galaxies were interacting galaxies, that is, galaxies that were undergoing a collision or near collision with a neighboring galaxy. The IRAS survey demonstrated the profound effect such collisions had on galaxies, and it could well be that such events dominated the evolution of most galaxies. (NASA MOR E-885-83-01 [postlaunch] Oct 28/85, revised Dec 2/85)
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