Dec 3 1985
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(New page: Dr. Michael Kaiser of the Goddard Space Flight Center said at a news conference today that, “We see no radio emissions from Uranus that would tell us it has a magnetic field, and we'...)
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Dr. Michael Kaiser of the Goddard Space Flight Center said at a news conference today that, “We see no radio emissions from Uranus that would tell us it has a magnetic field, and we're less than 46 million miles from the planet” with the Voyager 2 spacecraft, the Washington Post reported.
“We still pick up Jupiter's radio noise, Saturn's radio noise and even the sun's radio noise but we're not hearing any radio events at Uranus,” he added. If Uranus had no magnetic field, it would make it only the second known planet in the solar system without one, Venus being the other.
Kaiser said the sign of a planet's magnetic field was its radio noise, generated when protons and electrons poured off the sun and collided with the planet's magnetosphere. This collision triggered the one billion-watt radio signal from earth called the Northern Lights, a 100 billion-watt signal from Saturn, and a signal so loud from Jupiter that it dwarfed every other radio signal in the solar system.
“You don't need much to form a magnetosphere that would generate noise out at Uranus's distance,” Kaiser said, “so we figure we're either dealing with a planet that has no magnetic field at all or is so bizarre we don't even know what to look for.” Kaiser pointed out that a missing magnetic field suggested that Uranus had no internal heat source-no radioactive core such as that which made the rotating earth behave like a dynamo, and no internal heat source such as those that gave the rapidly rotating Jupiter and Saturn a strong magnetic field. “You need an internal heat source to drive a magnetic field,” Kaiser said. “A planet's rotation is not enough by itself to create one.” Voyager 2, which had been in space for eight years and had passed Jupiter and Saturn, on January 24 would fly within 51,000 miles of the cloud tops of Uranus. Voyager 2 would in August 1989 encounter Neptune, but its flight would not take it near Pluto, the last known planet from the sun. The spacecraft would then pass out of the solar system. (W Post, Dec 4/85, A20)
The Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission 61-B landed at 1:33 p.m. Pacific time today on the concrete runway at Edwards Air Force Base before 6,700 spectators, the NY Times reported. NASA selected the concrete runway because a week of rain had left scattered puddles on the usually dry lake bed runways.
“Atlantis looks beautiful,” Jesse Moore, NASA's associate administrator for space flight, said after the landing. Apart from “a few dings” around the ship's nose and landing gear, he added, there appeared to be “no unusual damage.” It was the second mission for the Atlantis, the newest in NASA's fleet of four orbiters. The crew described all aspects of the flight as highly successful. (NYT, Dec 4/85, B6)
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