Feb 11 1977
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(New page: Langley Research Center announced award of a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract worth about $1.8 million to Vought Corp. for design, development, and qualification of a Scout launch-vehicle ...)
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Langley Research Center announced award of a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract worth about $1.8 million to Vought Corp. for design, development, and qualification of a Scout launch-vehicle guidance system. Teledyne would do the designing under subcontract and Vought would integrate the system into the Scout. Work would proceed at the Vought plant in Dallas and Teledyne's plant in Northridge, Calif., under LaRC direction. (LaRC Release 77-3)
NASA announced it had adjudged successful the mission of Gravity Probe A (GP-A), launched June 18, 1976, on a Scout vehicle from Wallops Flight Center. Trajectory parameters computed for GP-A were within preflight predictions, and the experiment and support systems had operated normally. Principal investigator Dr. R.F.C. Vessot had begun data reduction and reported achieving an accuracy of 150 parts per million, surpassing the prelaunch accuracy objective of 200ppm. Associate Administrator for Space Science Dr. Noel W. Hinners noted that the payload had impacted in the Atlantic Ocean as planned and was not recovered. (MOR S-879-76-01 (postlaunch], Feb 14/77)
Analysis of telemetry data and flight films from the SPAR III mission launched Dec. 14 at White Sands Missile Range indicated successful performance of the electromagnetic levitation device designed to provide the first "containerless" way to process materials in space, MSFC announced.
Containerless processing, in which materials could be suspended, melted, and resolidified without touching a container, was thought to permit a degree of purity never before achieved in high-temperature processing, as the material in a conventional container would always exhibit contamination in some degree from the container itself. Apparatus used on SPAR III to process beryllium satisfied all operational requirements, like two other items in the payload: thermal migration of bubbles, and liquid mixing. An apparatus anomaly resulted in only "probable" success of an experiment on epitaxial growth; a fifth experiment, on coalescing of viscous bodies, apparently failed but would be carried again on a later flight. SPAR III rocket flights could offer 5min of near weightlessness in suborbital coast. (MSFC Release 77-23)
W Post staff writer Thomas O'Toole quoted administration sources as saying President Carter had chosen Dr. Frank Press, head of the department of earth and planetary sciences at the Mass. Inst. of Technology, to be White House science adviser. Press, considered one of the world's leading seismologists, had been one of a team of geophysicists who first described Antarctica as a continent rather than as an island of ice floating on earth's crust. He had also helped design and build the seismometers left on the moon by six crews of Apollo astronauts. A member of the Natl. Science Board, Press had been consultant to 7 federal agencies including DOD, the State Dept., and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Offered the job of science adviser to the president, Press apparently had not accepted it at once, and said by telephone from MIT that "nothing is settled." (W Post, Feb 11/77, A-2)
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