Feb 8 1993
From The Space Library
Richard B. Hoover of the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama, was named NASA inventor of the year for his invention of the Water-Window Imaging X-ray Microscope. This instrument should enable researchers to see in great detail high contrast x-ray images of proteins, chromosomes, and other tiny carbon structures inside living cells. (NASA Release 93-024)
NASA officials announced that they planned to eliminate a number of expensive facilities and delay several Space Station assembly missions in their attempt to cut growing cost projections for the program. Senior program officials said that they had reduced $1.08 billion in anticipated cost increases for the Space Station to $678 million. (Space News, Feb 8-14/93)
Orbital Sciences Corporation of Fairfax, Virginia, announced that it was again planning to launch its Pegasus orbital rocket after scrubbing launches three times in the past two months because of technical problems.
Pegasus, a winged, three-stage rocket that can put payloads weighing as much as 900 pounds into low-Earth orbit, was to launch a data-relay satellite that was designed and built in Brazil. The rocket would he dropped from the wing of a B-52 bomber airborne 80 miles off Florida's east coast. The satellite, which weighs 350 pounds, was designed to help monitor Brazil's environment. (W Post, Feb 8/93; USA Today, Feb 8/93); USA Today, Feb 9/93)
NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin instructed senior NASA managers to begin a five-month study that would examine whether to replace the Space Shuttle after 2005 or upgrade the fleet so that shuttles could fly until 2030. The study was being led by Arnold D. Aldrich, NASA Associate Administrator for Space Systems Development. (Space News, Feb. 8-14/93)
NASA added a spacewalk to a U.S. Shuttle mission scheduled for July as part of a continuing program to give astronauts experience before the start of Space Station construction in 1996. (Space News, Feb 8-14/93)
Some NASA scientists, following the "faster, better, cheaper" advice of NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, want to send two small space probes to study Pluto, the solar system's last known unexplored planet. The Plato mission could cost $600 million to $1 billion, depending on whether the probes were reached by Russian or U.S. rockets, respectively. By comparison, NASA expected to spend more than $2 billion to launch a spaceship in 1997 to explore Saturn. (AP, Feb 8/93)
A first formal industrial test of a system that uses computer-set lights to adjust a person's sleep patterns got underway in January at a San Diego Gas and Electric Company plant. The system may prove useful in keeping astronauts and night workers alert, easing jet lag, helping older people sleep, and helping teens get out of bed. NASA started using the system in 1991 to adapt astronauts to night launches and shift work.
In the test, doses of light were applied late in the evening to delay the onset of sleepiness or at other times to fool the body's internal clock. The illumination was 50 to 100 times brighter than normal indoor light, but only about one-thousandth as bright as sunlight on a sunny day. (AP, Feb 8/93)
Officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) recommended eliminating the JPL Edwards Test Facility, staffed by 28 JPL employees and 18 con-tractors, at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. If NASA managers accepted the recommendation, the facility could shut down by 1996. (UPI, Feb 8/93; Feb 9/Antelope Valley Press, Feb 9/93)
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