Sep 21 2000
From The Space Library
NASA selected 28 of 119 grant proposals, totaling US$ 10 million over four years, to conduct microgravity combustion research. NASA's Office of Life and Microgravity Science and Applications, which was sponsoring the grants would provide the researchers with access to its microgravity research facilities, including drop tubes, drop towers, aircraft-flying parabolic trajectories, and sounding rockets. Twenty-six of the grants were for ground-based research, and two were for flight-definition efforts; four grants continued NASA-funded work, but the remaining 24 entailed new research efforts.
Russian police announced that cosmonaut German S. Titov, the Soviet Union's second man in space and the first person to spend more than one day in orbit, had been found dead at home at the age of 65. Although the police had not reported an official cause of death, the media speculated that the cause was either carbon monoxide poisoning or a heart attack. Titov had spent 25 hours and 18 minutes aboard the tiny Soviet Vostok-2 spacecraft on 6 and 7 August 1961. Fellow Soviet Yuri A. Gagarin had made the first flight on Vostok-1 on 12 April, flying for less than 2 hours, and U.S. astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. had followed Gagarin's mission with a 15-minute, suborbital flight on 5 May 1961. Titov worked on the Buran program during the 1980s, attempting to create a Russian Space Shuttle, but the Soviet Union abandoned the project after the Russian shuttle had made one unpiloted flight. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Titov had entered politics, representing the Communist Party on the defense committee of the State Duma lower house.
Following a 24-hour delay caused by a computer anomaly, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) successfully launched the Lockheed Martin built, NOAA-L spacecraft from Vandenberg Air Force Base, aboard a Titan II rocket. Ground controllers confirmed that the craft had deployed its solar array and verified a power-positive condition. NASA and NOAA had designed the satellite, the second in a series of five polar-orbiting spacecraft, to collect meteorological data and to transmit the information to users worldwide. NAAA's National Weather Service planned to use the craft's data for long-range weather and climate forecasts. Although NASA had managed the project of building and launching the satellite, it intended to transfer operational control to NOAA 10 days following the launch.
NASA released time-lapse movies created from images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing "spectacular outbursts from young stars," changing "dramatically over a period of just weeks or months." NASA had combined individual images of young star systems XZ Tauri and HH 30 in the Taurus-Auriga molecular cloud, captured over several years, to create the time-lapse movies. Documenting the activity of the early stages of stars' lives, the movies demonstrated that images "taken of the universe today won't necessarily look the same as those snapped a few months from now.”
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