Jan 18 1993
From The Space Library
On December 23, Bill Clinton picked John H. Gibbons, head of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, to be his science and technology advisor. Gibbons planned to emphasize civilian-sector competitiveness; he also hoped to broaden industry's input into White House policy making while making sure that companies invested serious money into government-backed projects. (Bus Wk, Jan 18/93)
The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's Space Environment Services Center in Boulder, Colorado, prepared software that allowed scientists to state the level of confidence they had in their weather predictions. Such software allowed utilities to better gauge when to start back-up power that would make outages caused by stormy weather less harmful. (Bus Wk, Jan 18/93) January 19: NASA scientists at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, reported that depletion of stratospheric ozone over Antarctica in 1992 was as severe as in any previous year. Ozone is destroyed by chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which are used as solvents, propellants, and coolants. On September 23, 1992, the surface area of the ozone hole reached 8.9 million square miles. Measurements were taken by the Nimbus-7 and Meteor-3 Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) instruments. (NASA Release 93-14; UPI, Jan 19/93)
Astrophysicists reported that data from an x-ray spectrometer aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour might have come from a million-degree gas produced by a nearby and fairly recent supernova, or exploding star. Scientists have puzzled over these x-rays for 25 year. Wilton T. Sanders from the University of Wisconsin commented, "There's a lot more analysis that needs to be done before we can start pinning down the exact origin of these x-rays. At this point, we're just very happy with the results that we're getting. The x-rays do seem to clearly be from a thermal process." (W Times, Jan 19/93; B Sun, Jan 19/93; NASA Release, Jan 21/93)
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