Jan 5 1994
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The astronauts who made a nearly flawless repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope said they owed much of their success to the extraordinary training that went into the high-profile mission. The seven-member crew was picked earlier and trained longer-nearly two years-than any previous Shuttle crew, including 400 hours rehearsing in deep water tanks. However, at their first post-flight news conference they cautioned that future Shuttle missions would not get the same kind of support from the space agency's money managers. The mission commander, Air Force Colonel Richard O. Covey, said that clearly the NASA budget was not a limitless amount of money.
NASA officials said that since its release December 10, Hubble had been undergoing focusing and engineering tests conducted by remote control from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. (B Sun Jan 5/94)
NASA officials said that Kennedy Space Center (KSC) had not been home to any secret radiation tests on humans, and no workers were unknowingly exposed to any harmful materials. "We do not do anything like that here," KSC spokesperson Lisa Malone said. Life science research underway at the Space Center mostly involves growing plants and food in an environmentally controlled chamber at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as well as some muscle fatigue research in long-term bedrest studies to simulate weightlessness. The Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Ames Research Center near San Francisco are the facilities where most medical research on humans is conducted.
Agency spokesperson Michael Braukus noted that the agency was still organizing its efforts to find out exactly how NASA was involved in the nuclear research. NASA's use of radioactive materials has centered on developing rocket engines powered by nuclear reactions and using a nuclear reaction to generate electricity in space. Former astronauts Alan Bean and Gene Cernan said they had never served as human guinea pigs. (Fla Today, Jan 5/94)
Two American scientists, Clark Chapman and David Morrison, wrote in Nature magazine that society might want to decide whether to pay for a sky survey to track comets and asteroids that could crash into the Earth with catastrophic results, so that governments could use nuclear arms to smash or divert them. NASA proposed a Spaceguard Survey to map all asteroids large enough to cause global catastrophe. It would cost $50 million to set up and $10 million in annual operating costs. (Reuters, Jan 5/94)
NASA continued tests of the Research External Vision Display (REVD), a new optical system allowing pilots to see a runway during nose-high landings without computer-generated views. The REVD, basically an upside-down periscope, is a system of lenses and mirrors that reflects the view of the runway under the aircraft nose to the pilot. NASA started the first of up to 20 tests on the device on an F-104 aircraft at its Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility at Edwards Air Force Base, California. The REVD approach differs from that used in the European Concorde and Russian Tu-144 supersonic transports, which drop the entire nose of the aircraft in front of the windshield. It could be used on a future U.S. supersonic airliner. (NASA Release, 94-2)
NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin announced receipt of a report investigating the loss of the Mars Observer mission. Dr. Timothy Coffey, director of research at the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, and chairman of the independent investigative board studying the Mars Observer failure, delivered the report to the NASA Administrator. Dr. Coffey "candidly pointed out management and technical concerns that must be addressed." (NASA Release 94-1, 2/9)
NASA awarded a four-year, $39.8-million contract to the California Institute of Technology (CIT) for the design and development phase of the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) science payload. The science pay-load on the ACE spacecraft consists of nine instruments: a Solar Isotope Spectrometer: a Cosmic Ray Isotope Spectrometer; a Solar Wind Ionic Mass Spectrometer; a Solar Wind Ionic Composition Spectrometer; an Ultra Low Energy Isotope Spectrometer; a Solar Energetic Particle Ionic Charge Analyzer; a Magnetometer; an Energetic Electron, Proton, and Alpha-particle Monitor; and a Solar Wind Electron, Proton, and Alpha-particle Monitor. (NASA Release C94-a)
The Mars Observer spacecraft, the first U.S. mission to study Mars since the Viking missions 18 years ago, fell silent three days before entering orbit around Mars. NASA officials reported the probable cause of communication loss as a rupture in the fuel (monomethyl hydrazine-MMH) pressurization side of the spacecraft's propulsion system. This would have caused an unsymmetrical pressurized leak of helium gas and liquid MMH, resulting in a net spin rate, which in turn would have put the craft in a contingency mode. Tests conducted at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Pasadena, California, yielded several possible failures. Goldin asked Dr. Wes Huntress, Associate Administrator for NASA's Office of Space Science, to conduct a thorough review of the findings and recommendations and to report back in the near future on corrective actions to be taken by NASA. (NASA Release 94-1; USA Today, Jan 6/94; NY Times, Jan 6/94; B Sun, Jan 6/94; WSJ, Jan 6/94; W Post, Jan 6/94; LA Times, Jan 6/94; W Times, Jan 6/94)
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