Jul 15 1992
From The Space Library
NASA said that construction had started on a high-flying, light-weight, unpiloted research aircraft called "Perseus" that NASA was to use to measure ozone levels and other atmospheric conditions. NASA viewed Perseus as the first step toward general use of advanced aircraft for many aspects of Earth sciences research such as climate and radiation studies, tropical dynamics, meteorology, and for studies of the stratosphere and troposphere. Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation of Manassas, Virginia, won the $2.25 million contract to design, build, and flight test two Perseus aircraft. Flight tests were slated to begin in late 1992. (NASA Release 92-110)
Solar scientists were puzzled by an unexpected "gamma ray afterglow" discovered on the Sun by NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The glow, a strong emanation of high-energy gamma rays, persisted for more than five hours after a solar flare explosion on June 11, 1991. A similar phenomenon occurred four days later. The scientists also announced that the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory had taken the first image of the Sun in neutrons, the first picture of any celestial object ever made with neutrons, that is, matter, rather than light. Another scientist reported that the Hubble Space Telescope had found evidence of powerful beams of downward-streaming protons at the onset of a stellar flare while looking at a red dwarf star more than 30 light-years away. Solar flares can produce magnetic storms on Earth that interfere with electrical power and radio transmissions. (NASA Releases 92-112 and 92-113; NY Times, Jul 16/92; USA Today, Jul 16/92; The Sun, Jul 16/92; P Inq, Jul 16/92; UPI, Jul 15/92, Jul 17/92; W Post, Jul 20/92; Space News, Jul 27-Aug 9/92)
A study conducted for the Federal Aviation Administration by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments concluded that the Washington area could support flights of "tiltrotor" aircraft to New York and Boston. Tiltrotors would be competitive with commercial aircraft within a range of about 350 nautical miles from Washington. To date, tiltrotor aircraft had been developed and flown by the military, which hoped to use the craft for transporting troops. (W Post, Jul 16/92)
The "New York Times" reported that the Georgia Institute of Technology was engaged in experiments to measure the impact of sonic booms on people and buildings. The research was part of a NASA program to develop a supersonic commercial airplane larger and faster than the Concorde. (NY Times, Jul 15/92)
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