Jan 17 1980
From The Space Library
A military communications satellite fired into orbit from Cape Canaveral in an Atlas Centaur January 17 had "settled into temporary orbit" and was performing superbly, according to U.S. Air Force Col. George Breton, mission director. The 4,100-pound Fleet Satellite Communications spacecraft originally was scheduled for launch in December 1979. (W Post, Jan 19/80, A-9)
NASA announced that it would extend the mission of HEAO 2, nicknamed Einstein, beyond its projected lifetime of 11 months. Dr. Thomas A. Mutch, NASA associate administrator for space science, said Einstein, second of the three high-energy astronomy observatories, had not only produced significant results [see December 11, 1979] but had also lent itself to a guest-investigator program that had garnered about 400 proposals from 80 groups in the United States and other nations, including Great Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, India, and Japan.
HEAO 1, launched in 1977, had mapped about 1,500 X-ray sources and measured for the first time the uniform high-energy X-ray background of space. HEAO 3, launched in September 1979, was making an all-sky survey of cosmic and gamma rays at higher energies and from a higher orbital inclination than the first observatory. (NASA Release 80-6)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
