May 24 1991
From The Space Library
Space News for this day. (1MB PDF)
According to the Wall Street Journal, Telesat Canada planned to file a $240 million insurance claim because of the failure of its Anik E2 communications satellite launched in April to deploy one of its two antennae. (WSJ, May 24/91)
The Washington limes reported that NASA's Johnson Space Center near Houston had 842 pounds of moon rocks brought back by 12 moonwalkers on six Apollo flights between 1969 and 1972. The rocks are loaned to scientific groups for study. Each nation in the world also has a small piece of Moon rock, sent at President Nixon's instruction in the early 1970s. (W Times, May 24/91)
The media reported that NASA engineers had debated whether to remove additional sensors in Columbia that might be cracked. NASA planned to create a new investigative team to review the process of flaw detection. (NY Times, May 24/91; W Post, May 24/91; B Sun, May 24/91; W Times, May 24/91; USA Today, May 24/91; AP, May 24/91; UPI, May 24/91)
NASA announced that David Reasoner, Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite (CRRES) project scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama, would chair the May 28 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Baltimore. At the session, results of the CRRES artificial Earth auroras experiment would be discussed. (NASA Release 91-77)
NASA announced the May 30 harvesting of its first research crop of lettuce grown in a specially outfitted chamber at Johnson Space Center, Houston, by the Engineering Directorate's Crew and Thermal Systems Division. This harvest was to follow a test crop harvested in February as part of the Regenerative Life Support Systems program focused on recycling air and water and producing food, as part of NASA's future long duration missions on the Moon and Mars. (NASA Release 91-78)
NASA Administrator Richard H. Truly announced, following a senior management meeting, that NASA would conduct a thorough review of the recent discovery that a fuel sensor removed from Space Shuttle Columbia last fall was cracked. However, Truly indicated that the sensor problem on Columbia had been corrected and the Shuttle was now tentatively scheduled for launch on June 1. (NASA Release 91-79; AP, May 25/91; UPI, May 25/91)
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