Sep 11 1997
From The Space Library
NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Federal Aviation Administration signed a joint memorandum of agreement providing guidelines for commercial spaceports. The agreement was the culmination of a long debate over how the federal government could encourage private companies and state governments to use available federal launch sites. The White House Office of Science and Technology initiative had proposed the agreement, which sought to limit the regulatory steps a private company would have to take to become a launch-site operator. The measure continued the federal government's trend of encouraging private industry to explore space.
Mars Global Surveyor fired its engine enabling Mars's gravitational pull to capture it. Researchers from NASA's JPL declared that the spacecraft had behaved exactly as planned during the crucial entry to Mars's gravitational field. Experts predicted that the mission would produce 700 million bits of data, more than the amount acquired in all previous Mars missions combined. The mapping mission continued a new era of Mars exploration for NASA, involving dozens of probes surveying the planet's surface and atmosphere.
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