Jan 10 1985
From The Space Library
Four years after cancellation of the National Oceanic Satellite System (NOSS), the U.S. Navy had begun to develop a simple, low-cost system to monitor ocean conditions routinely from space, Aerospace Daily reported. Budgeted at about a third the estimated cost of NOSS, the Navy Remote Ocean Sensing System (NROSS) would have nearly the same capability as NOSS by 1989, lacking particularly the synthetic aperture radar, and would use many of the ocean observation capabilities NASA's SEASAT program demonstrated in 1979.
The Pentagon had avoided $591.5 million in FY 1981-88 costs by canceling NOSS (NASA and NOAA contributions would have made the total over $1 billion). NROSS would use a single-satellite system with no backup; the Navy would resolve later the issue of replenishment satellites. NROSS would also use existing or already planned data-processing equipment at the Navy's Fleet Numerical Oceanography Center and the USAF's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program command and control facilities.
The Navy expected to spend about $200 million from FY 85 development through a launch in 1989, with a NASA contribution of $115 million ($35 million for the satellite program and $80 million in research). The Office of Management and Budget had vetoed use of NOAA's NOAA-D spacecraft as the NROSS bus, so NROSS would use a Block 5D-2 DMSP spacecraft. The Navy had planned an Atlas E launch, but was considering a refurbished Titan II ICBM. Planners rejected a Space Shuttle launch as too expensive.
CONFERENCES The Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL) hosted January 10-11 150 cometary scientists from around the world at a meeting of the Internatl. Halley Watch (IHW), for which JPL was the western hemisphere lead center and University of Erlangen-Nurnberg, W. Germany, the eastern hemisphere lead center, the JPL Universe reported. Lead center representatives at the meeting had joined IHW discipline specialists in such fields as astronomy, photometry and polarimetry, radio science, and spectroscopy; representatives of European, Japanese, and Soviet spacecraft missions to Halley; and IHW steering group members. The IHW organized a group of ground-based professional and amateur Halley watchers worldwide to coordinate their observations with those of airborne, earth-orbital, and spacecraft-flyby observations. Nine hundred professional astronomers from 50 countries and some 300 amateur astronomers had signed on as members of the IHW.
JPL expected the IHW meeting would be the last before perihelion, Halley's closest approach to the sun on February 9 at 53.1 million miles. Since its 1948 inbound leg of its 74-year orbit around the sun, Halley would make its closest approaches to earth on November 27 at 57.6 million miles and the following April 11 at 39 million miles.
Astronomers had already observed that Halley's coma (the bright halo of dust and gas surrounding the nucleus) had begun developing and questioned why the comet exhibited this feature at such a great distance from the sun. Early observations had also unexpectedly revealed the comet's brightness was fluctuating.
Amateur observers with small telescopes would be able to see Halley by fall 1985; naked-eye viewing would be possible by March or April 1986. Halley would appear again in 2061. (JPL Universe, Jan 25/85, 1)
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