May 3 1969
From The Space Library
Press conference on results of NASA'S OAO II orbiting astronomical observatory (launched Dec. 7, 1968) was held at NASA Hq. OAO Project Manager Joseph Purcell of GSFC said spacecraft's five months of orbital operations had been "a fabulous success" and all spacecraft systems were operating normally. As of last week, he said, "we had 137 mission days. [Univ. of] Wisconsin [experiment] has been pointed to 846 different locations in the sky [and] 344 of those were unique objects that they were studying. SAO, the Smithsonian package, has been pointed at 483 separate locations and taken some 1,172 pictures." (Transcript)
NASA's Explorer XXXIV (IMP-F) Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (launched May 24, 1967) reentered earth's atmosphere. More complex than previous IMP spacecraft, Explorer XXXIV had carried 11 experiments and obtained more than 170,000 hrs of data on solar activity, near-earth environment, and magnetosphere. (GSFC SSR, 5/15/69; NASA Release 69-63)
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