Oct 20 1975
From The Space Library
Kennedy Space Center announced a reorganization to prepare for the Space Shuttle era of space operations. John J. Neilon, Director of Unmanned Launch Operations since 1970, was named Deputy Director of Technical Support; George F. Page, Chief of Operations, Div. of Manned Spacecraft Operations, would move into Neilon's former post.
The Launch Operations Directorate would be reorganized into four major second-level groups: engineering, payloads, space transportation systems processing, and expendable vehicle operations. (KSC Release 253-75)
The Soviet Union may establish a ground station to receive data directly from the U.S. Landsat earth resources satellites, under a cooperative program in which the U.S. would establish facilities to receive data from Soviet weather satellites, NASA Administrator James Fletcher announced in Moscow. Landsat could be of enormous value to the Soviet Union, which is judged to have vast untapped oil and mineral deposits, which depends heavily for power on its water resources, and which needs help in improving crop yields and forecasting. (SBD, 20 Sept 75, 255)
20-22 October: More than 100 astronomers from the United States and several foreign countries had gathered at Goddard Space Flight Center to exchange information on x-ray astronomy. The symposium had been arranged to discuss compact double-star systems that emit x-rays and that had been observed in other spectral bands-radio, optical, ultraviolet. Earth's galaxy alone contained 100 binary (doublestar) x-ray objects, discovered by spacecraft observing their emissions beyond the radiation-absorbing blanket of earth's atmosphere.
Astronomers had considered the compact stars in these binary systems the most exciting objects of current research: the stars have masses close to that of earth's sun, but diameters of only about 10 km. Neutron stars, for example, had been found so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh a billion metric tons, and "black holes" would be even more dense. Five satellites currently in earth orbit had been observing celestial x-rays: Copernicus, Oso 8, and Sas 3, managed by GSFC, and the U.K.'s Ariel 5 and the Netherlands' Ans 1, for which GSFC had coordination responsibility. In the past year spacecraft had discovered six new and extremely powerful x-ray sources, brightness in the sky, known as x-ray novas from their sudden brightening and subsequent fading after several months. One of these x-ray novas is as bright as earth's sun and more than 10 times brighter than the easily visible Crab Nebula, most famous of the supernovas (exploding stars). (NASA Release 75-279; JSC Roundup, 24 Sept 75, 1)
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