Mar 1 1976
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(New page: NASA's cancellation of a mission to Uranus by withholding funds in a severely restricted budget for FY 1977 had produced a "Uranus option" plan, sponsored by engineers at the [[Jet Propuls...)
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NASA's cancellation of a mission to Uranus by withholding funds in a severely restricted budget for FY 1977 had produced a "Uranus option" plan, sponsored by engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that would take a spacecraft destined for Saturn and give it the ability to go the extra distance to Uranus as well. In an interview with the New York Times, John R. Casani-deputy project manager of the Mariner project at JPL-said the necessary trajectories had been plotted, and modification of the spacecraft remote-sensing instruments to use at Uranus was already under way.
Of the two Mariner missions scheduled for launch in Aug. and Sept. 1977, to fly by Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in Nov. 1980 and Jan. 1981, the first mission would remain unchanged. The second Mariner, trailing the first by 9 mo, would fly a lower speed trajectory to allow a bigger slingshot effect from Saturn's gravity for propulsion toward Uranus; the slower speed would also allow flight controllers to decide on the basis of the first Saturn flyby whether to use the second Mariner for a closer look at Saturn or to go for Uranus. The second choice would mean that, by 1985, U.S. spacecraft would have looked closely at all the planets of the solar system except Neptune and Pluto; a Mariner flyby of Uranus between Nov. 1985 and Jan. 1986 would take the spacecraft further out into the solar system, toward Neptune. Obtaining data on Neptune would take "a miracle," Casani said, although the JPL engineers would not rule out the possibility. The infrared spectrometer on the second Mariner would be improved in sensitivity to detect the temperature of Uranus, twice as far from the sun as Saturn is, and 20 times as far as earth; also, the spacecraft would be able to photograph Uranus, 4 times the diameter of earth, and gather data on its magnetic field, atmosphere, and other physical properties. The Mariner missions to Jupiter and Saturn would cost about $305 million; addition of the trip to Uranus would add about $21 million to the cost of the mission. (NYT, 1 Mar 76, 11)
An all-systems simulation of landing Vikings 1 and 2 on the surface of Mars, to exercise the entire 750-person Viking flight team so that everyone knew exactly what to do when the time came later this year, began 20 Feb. and built up to a "Mars landing" 22 Feb., concluding today as a "fantastic success" according to James S. Martin, Jr., project manager at Viking Control in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory installation in the San Gabriel Mts. near Pasadena. The computer program had to be redesigned to facilitate uplink command to the spacecraft cameras, and more time had to be allowed for certain ground-control and data processing procedures, but no major problems developed. In the room where a full-scale model of the Viking lander complete with operational cameras stood on a simulated Martian surface, prankish team members had put three tiny marine fossils from earth's Paleozoic period on the sand within the camera field-of-view. When the camera came on to transmit after the simulated landing, the first picture was startling, but the fossils were immediately recognized, and the joke demonstrated that even tiny objects near the landing site would appear in the pictures transmitted from Mars. (NYT, 4 Mar 76, 32)
Lt. Col. Michael A. Love, test pilot of the successful NASA lifting-body program, was killed in the crash of an F-4C fighter on a dry lake bed at Edwards AFB, Calif., shortly after takeoff in a proficiency flight. Love's navigator, Maj. E.B. Underwood, Jr., ejected from the plane before it crashed and was hospitalized in stable condition. Love, 37, was chief AF pilot assigned to the X-24B program that tested a wingless aircraft to develop a space vehicle that could be flown to earth and landed like a plane. After serving in the lifting-body program as a chase pilot for various M-2 and X-24A flights, Love made his first X-24B flight on 4 Oct. 1973 and had piloted the plane to its fastest speed-better than 1860 kph-before terminating the program 20 Aug. 1975 with a hard surface landing of the X-24B on the runway at Edwards. (W Star, 2 Mar 76, A-5; W Post, 3 Mar 76, A-20; NASA X-Press, 12 Mar 76, 2)
At 0300 GMT (12:30 pm local time) the Japanese ionosphere sounding satellite Ume was launched from the Tanegashima site on the 3-stage liquid-fuel N rocket to an orbital altitude of about 1000 km. The cylindrical satellite weighed 139 kg, had a diameter of 94 cm, and was 82 cm high. Its estimated lifetime was 1.5 yr. This was the second successful launch with the new N rocket. (FBIS, Kyodo 29 Feb 76)
A technical management team called SPICE (for Spacelab payload integration and coordination in Europe) would be established by the European Space Agency as the result of a planning meeting in Paris, ESA announced. The team would work at the Federal Republic of Germany's technical center at Porz-Wahn, with half of its 20 members from the center's staff; the ESA announcement called the center "the European organization that has devoted the most effort to forecasting, studying and preparing the utilisation of Spacelab." Max Hauzeur, manager of the SPICE team, would be responsible for a number of items for the first Spacelab payload: coordination of instrument and experiment development; data management; design and interface specifications; schedule monitoring; acceptance of experiments, and approval of integration tests; and coordination of training programs. (ESA release, 1 Mar 76)
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced an agreement on loan of a radiometer for 2 yr to the Iranian College of Science and Technology at Tehran for use in propagation experiments in the 12-ghz band, to be used by European relay satellites for long-distance public telecommunications. The experiments would be carried out in "particularly interesting conditions," ESA said, because of Iran's geographical and climatic characteristics. (ESA release, 1 Mar 76)
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