Jan 23 1976
From The Space Library
Three space scientists at Johnson Space Center would begin a week-long round-the-clock test of experiments and procedures in a mockup of the Spacelab designed for the Space Shuttle. The team, headed by astronaut-physician Dr. Story Musgrave, would eat, sleep, and perform space-related duties in a mockup of the Shuttle orbiter crew compartment, and would carry out more than 20 experiments in space medicine and one in space physics inside the 6.8-m-by-4.06-m Spacelab mockup. The team inside would be inconstant communication with flight operations engineers and scientists at control points outside the mockup, which had been equipped with both instruments and experiments just as the Spacelab would be. The team would demonstrate 14 operational tests whose results would serve in planning inflight crew activities, procedures, and scheduling, and in studying items such as personal hygiene, general housekeeping and special-purpose cleaning and maintenance, and functional utility of the orbiter aft deck from which many of the Spacelab experiments would be monitored. The simulation was also designed to evaluate ground-support procedures and data-handling techniques. (JSC Release 76-04)
INTELSAT-the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization awarded a 9-mo $75 000 contract to Hughes Aircraft Co. for development of improved vibration-test techniques for testing future INTELSAT spacecraft, leading to reduced spacecraft weight and a lessening of Spacecraft fatigue. (INTELSAT Release 76-1-M)
The Soviet Union would use artificial satellites and manned orbital stations to investigate dynamic processes in the ocean during the new 5-yr plan period, Tass reported. Soviet oceanologist Leonid Brekhovskikh in an interview forecast a growing number of experiments conducted jointly with other countries, among them a "polymode" experiment with the U.S. to study the nature of huge vertical formations in the ocean discovered by Soviet scientists in 1970. The USSR also planned a global satellite experiment called "pigap" for concurrent study of dynamic processes in the atmosphere and the ocean. (FBIS, Moscow Tass, U 1, 29 Jan 76)
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