Dec 12 1978
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(New page: NASA announced it had signed a $77 million contract with General Electric Space Division to build Landsat-D, most advanced earth-resources-monitoring satellite system to date, schedule...)
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NASA announced it had signed a $77 million contract with General Electric Space Division to build Landsat-D, most advanced earth-resources-monitoring satellite system to date, scheduled for launch in 1981 to view the earth from more than 640km (400mi) altitude. In addition to a multispectral scanner (MSS) like that on the first three Landsats, Landsat-D would carry a thematic mapper (TM) with spatial resolution three times as detailed as that of MSS. The new sensor could distinguish area features as small as 0.2-acre instantaneous field-of-view (IFOV) compared to the 1.2-acre IFOV resolution of present systems. The cost included a $5 million fee with possible additional earnings up to $4.3 million, depending on system performance once the satellite was in orbit. The contract included a backup spacecraft, data management system, operations control center at GSFC, transportable ground station, and a Landsat assessment system to demonstrate advantages of the TM over the MSS.
Landsat data had served primarily for monitoring earth resources and managing food, fiber, and water resources; mineral and petroleum explorations; and land cover and land-use mapping. The U.S. Depts. of Agriculture, Commerce, Interior, and State, and a number of states and foreign governments would participate in the Landsat-D mission. (NASA Release 78-188).
FBIS reported that Oleg Gazenko, director of the USSR's Manned Spaceflight Institute of Medico-Biological Problems, said in an interview that cosmonauts Vladimir Kovalenok and Alexander Ivanchenkov were physiologically "as healthy as they were before the [[[Soyuz 29]]] spaceflight" [see Nov. 2]. The record 140-day flight had caused some functional changes: . . . "the cosmonauts lost apart of the muscle mass, which they have now restored. They returned to earth with erythrocytes that were born in space. The average life span of erythocytes is 120 days, and they are fully renewed during this period." Gazenko said that the cosmic erythrocytes tended to be smaller, though they fully retained the main function of carrying oxygen to the tissues. "As time passes, the erythrocytes that were born in weightlessness Will perish. But what will those that will replace them be like? Identical to those that were born before the space flight? Apparently yes, because our organism is a wonderful instrument of self-regulation; it excellently arranges all the processes taking place in it in such a way that they would meet the demands made by those conditions in which man is staying." Gazenko had directed research that substantiated the possibility of manned spaceflight, and had received the 1978 USSR state prize for studies of ways to counteract unfavorable effects of weightlessness on the human organism, making lengthy manned spaceflights possible. (FBIS, Tass in English, Dec 12/78)
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