Apr 25 1977
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(New page: NASA reported it had selected Trudy Tiedemann, former public information specialist at DFRC, as its first female commentator. She would serve as announcer during the Shuttle orbiter flight...)
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NASA reported it had selected Trudy Tiedemann, former public information specialist at DFRC, as its first female commentator. She would serve as announcer during the Shuttle orbiter flight-test program. (NASA Release 77-84)
MSFC announced award of a 1-yr $450 540 contract to Sperry Univac, Washington, D.C., for on-site maintenance of the center's Univac 1108 computer system. (MSFC Release 77-69)
April 25-28: Controllers at ESA's European space center at Darmstadt, West Germany, had fired Geos 1's apogee kick motor at 0738 GMT to boost the satellite into a new 12hr elliptic orbit (38 498km apogee, 2131km perigee, 25.85° orbital inclination) that would maximize return of scientific data. Although ESA officials had hoped to delay the orbit change until after a meeting of Geos experimenters scheduled for April 26, the spacecraft's anomalous transfer orbit, caused by a malfunction during launch Apr. 20, had endangered its solar cell power supply. (ESA Release Apr 25/77)
ESA officials and Geos satellite experimenters during a meeting April 26 at the European space operations center in Darmstadt agreed on a sequence for experiment activation and boom deployment. After increasing satellite "visibility" at the Odenwald ground station near ESOC by moving the Geos I apogee from 90°E to 35°E, controllers planned to extend the short radial booms completely and the long booms to 10cm. If this ploy worked, the 20m-long radial booms would extend completely Apr. 30 to help establish the satellite's moment-of-inertia ratio and dynamic stability. (ESA Release Apr 27/77)
Scientists of Geos 1 believed its new orbit, 'whose apogee was high as that of the intended orbit, could salvage most of its scientific objectives, Nature reported. The new path would put Geos 1 where ESA had planned to orbit its spare "qualifications" geosynchronous satellite in 1979; launch costs had made use of the spare unlikely, the report said. (Nature, Apr 28/77, 767)
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