Nov 25 1980
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(New page: ARC announced that it would host a workshop in December on the atmosphere of Titan, largest of Saturn's moons and bigger than the planet Mercury. Experts on Titan from NASA, the university...)
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ARC announced that it would host a workshop in December on the atmosphere of Titan, largest of Saturn's moons and bigger than the planet Mercury. Experts on Titan from NASA, the university community, and elsewhere would discuss the temperature, pressure, and physical nature of Titan's surface, in view of new data from Voyager 1's flyby. (ARC Release 80-85)
ARC announced a briefing December 4 on findings from the Pioneer Venus orbiter and five atmosphere probes. Scientists could now explain the planetwide circulation of the Venus atmosphere; ultraviolet photography over a two year period showed long-term patterns of cloud circulation; more new work seemed to explain the "hothouse effect" that produced Venus's heat; and new measurements were available of elements in that atmosphere. For television, ARC had prepared large color illustrations of Venus atmosphere circulation as well as new color pictures of the planet and models of the Pioneer orbiter. (ARC Release 80-84)
NASA announced selection of Ball Aerospace Systems to negotiate a cost plus-award-fee contract estimated at $21 million for an Earth Radiation Budget Satellite ERBS and mission operations support. The satellite would be integrated, tested, and delivered for Shuttle launch by April 1984. Working with NOAA-F and NOAA-G, it would become part of a three-spacecraft system using scanning and nonscanning radiometers to measure solar radiation received and reflected from various regions of Earth. NASA's experimental Nimbus 6 and Nimbus 7 carried radiation-budget instruments, but the (ERBS) would offer for the first time measurement of radiation on a global basis 24 hours per day. (NASA Release 80-178)
NASA reported that Peter Bird, a 33-year-old London photographer, who in 1974 crossed the Atlantic with a friend in a rowboat, had left Baja California for Australia November 11 alone in the same vessel (Royal Navy rescue boat Britannia II) carrying a NASA locator beacon of the type used on Nimbus 6. This type of beacon had tracked a two-man balloon crossing of the Atlantic, an expedition into the Egyptian desert, and a Japanese explorer's hike from Canada to the North Pole and the length of Greenland, all in 1978, sending data to GSFC for computation and relay to pinpointing locations. Bird would use the locator for his own position computations. (NASA Release 80-177)
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