Oct 2 1985
From The Space Library
NASA announced that live classroom lessons and scientific demonstrations, which would be broadcast live around the country, would be filmed for use in educational products which were just some of the activities planned by Christa McAuliffe, the finalist in the NASA Teacher in Space Project, for Space Shuttle mission 51-L.
The first live lesson, entitled “The Ultimate Field Trip,” would allow students to compare daily life on the Space Shuttle with that on earth. McAuliffe would take viewers on a tour of the orbiter, explaining crew members' roles, showing the location of computers and controls, and explaining experiments being conducted on the mission. She would also demonstrate how daily life in space was different from that on earth in the preparation of food, movement, exercise, personal hygiene, sleep, and the use of leisure time.
The second lesson, called “Where We've Been, Where We're Going,” would help the audience understand why people use and explore space by demonstrating the advantages of manufacturing in the microgravity environment, explaining technological advances that evolved from the space program, and projecting the future of humans in space.
Also during the flight, McAuliffe would participate in activities that would be filmed and later used in educational products. Possible activities included demonstrating earth magnetism by photographing and observing the lines of magnetic force in three dimensions in a microgravity environment; demonstrating Newton's first, second, and third laws in a microgravity environment; discussing why products might or might not effervesce in a microgravity environment; encouraging creative works from students that reflected their interpretation of the space program/experience; explaining the use of simple machines/tools and the similarities and differences between their uses in space and on earth; showing the effect of microgravity on plant growth, growth of plants without soil (hydroponics), and capillary action; and demonstrating chromatographic separation of pigments in a microgravity environment.
In addition, McAuliffe would assist mission specialists conducting three Shuttle Student Involvement Project experiments that would fly onboard the Space Shuttle. The experiments dealt with using a semi permeable membrane to direct crystal growth, studying chicken embryo development in space, and the effect of weightlessness on grain formation and strength in metals. (NASA Release 85-139)
NASA announced that U.S., French, West German, and United Kingdom scientists completed preliminary findings from the September 11 [see Astronomy, Sept. 11] encounter of NASA's International Cometary Explorer (ICE) spacecraft with comet Giacobini-Zinner, which took place 44 million miles from earth and was the first comet intercept in history. In the precedent-setting encounter, ICE, traveling at 46,000 miles an hour, entered at approximately 6:50 a.m. EDT, September 11, the 14,000-mile-wide tail of the comet 4,900 miles behind the cometary nucleus and emerged from the tail about 20 minutes later. Midpoint of the tail encounter came at 7:02 a.m., when the spacecraft passed through a narrow region called the neutral sheet. ICE was then on its way to its fourth space exploration assignment to record on October 31 and March 28, 1986 solar wind measurements upstream of Halley's Comet. (NASA Release 85-138)
NASA's Ames Research Center (ARC) announced that the world's fastest and most powerful supercomputer, the Cray-2, arrived at ARC to assist researchers in taking major steps toward simulating actual aircraft flight and thus making possible important advances, both in cost savings and performance, in aircraft design. The Cray-2 could perform 250 million continuous calculations per second, which was more than three times faster than the previous generation of supercomputers.
The Cray-2 was the first building block in the creation of NASA's Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation (NAS) program, planned to provide the world's most powerful, large-scale high-speed processor system. In addition to its advantages for aircraft design, NAS represented an important national facility in such research areas as aerothermodynamics, computational chemistry, atmospheric modeling, and other computationally intensive scientific applications.
NASA planned the NAS system as an ongoing project with continuous improvements in speed and memory. Its objectives were to establish and maintain a leading-edge national computation capability to ensure leadership in computational fluid dynamics and related disciplines, provide an integrated processing system capable of a sustained 250 million floating-point, operations-per-second processing rate in 1986 and a one billion rate in 1987, and act as a pathfinder in advanced, large-scale computer systems capability.
The Cray-2 was four feet high and four feet in diameter; its small size was made possible by microminiaturization of the electronic circuits and extremely dense packing of the circuit boards. Since the speed of light was a fundamental limit on computer speed, super fast machines had to be smaller in order to reduce distances that information traveled. Computer scientists indicated they expected to get still more speed in future machines by further reducing size and adding more parallel processors.
A main feature of the Cray-2 was its large random-access memory, which was 16 times larger than previous supercomputers' memories. The Cray-2's memory provided random access from any of the machine's four main processors and any of its high-speed data channels. This meant a user could use all or part of this memory quickly, rather than taking hours to access data for large calculations.
Another main feature of the machine was that its tightly-packed, heat-producing electronic components were immersed for cooling in a colorless odorless, inert fluorocarbon liquid, the first such design in computer history. (ARC Release 85-38)
Goddard Space Flight Center January 14: NASA announced that Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) to industry to develop a space platform providing five years of on-orbit services to NASA payloads while allowing the developer to market it to commercial users, an innovative approach considered a first step toward creating a closer partnership between government and industry in space. Industry would finance, develop, own, and operate the platform with first use planned in late 1988 and would be free to market the platform (totally separate from NASA's plans for a government-developed, permanently manned space station) for materials processing or other manufacturing activities.
NASA stipulated that the platform be capable of providing services for four future projects: the extreme ultraviolet explorer (EUVE), the x-ray timing explorer (XTE), a zero-gravity payload, and an as yet unidentified project.
The Space Shuttle or other launch vehicle would place the commercial platform in orbit. Commercial payloads would reimburse the government for use of the orbiter and facilities. (NASA Release 85-7)
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