Jul 22 1980
From The Space Library
NASA unveiled the first scientific and applications payload for the STS (Shuttle) at GSFC's clean room, where instruments were installed in the package planned as an alternate payload on orbital test flight 4, scheduled for April 1982. (Prime payload for this flight belonged to DOD.) Called OSS-1 for NASA's Office of Space Science, the entire payload was designed, built, tested, and integrated by a team of GSFC engineers and scientists headed by Ken Kissin, OSS-1 mission manager, and Jon Busse, project manager for Shuttle payload integration and rocket experiments. Project scientists were Drs. Siegfried Bauer and Werner Neupert. The seven principal OSS-1 experiments were in the disciplines of space plasma physics, solar physics, astronomy, and life sciences, each represented by one or more instruments. (NASA Release 80-114, 80-117)
NASA announced that a sunspot hotline set up at GSFC would keep the public informed about solar flares during the 1980 peak cycle of activity. Daily recorded messages would contain information on sunspots, solar flares, geomagnetic storms, and the impact of solar activity on radio transmissions, for instance. The recordings provided jointly by NASA and NOAA through its space environment services center in Boulder, Colo., would originate in the SMM facility at GSFC. The "Solar Max" spacecraft launched February 14 was an Orbiting Solar Observatory carrying seven instruments whose data, coordinated with data from scientists at ground-based observatories throughout the world, would permit the most comprehensive investigation of solar flares ever made. Information from these sources would be relayed to GSFC on a 24-hour basis so that NASA scientists could determine which active regions of the Sun to study during the next 24 hours. (NASA Release 80-116)
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