November 1975
From The Space Library
An x-ray telescope assembled at Marshall Space Flight Center for the study of remnants of an exploded star had been shipped from England;, where it had undergone payload integration, to the Woomera Rocket Range in Australia for launch. The project, called Skylark for the British sounding rocket on which the telescope would fly, was a joint British-American undertaking to study a supernova remnant known as Puppis A for information on the evolution of stars and perhaps on the formation of neutron stars. The flight would provide at least 3 min 20 sec for the 346.5-kg payload to make its observations above 120-km altitude. (NASA Release 75-287; MSFC Release 75-238)
States involved in NASA's land-use satellite applications had included Ala., Miss., and Tenn.,, which had organized statewide survey programs, and Mo., which had just begun such a program. The Southern Growth Policies Board, a 15-state group monitoring the South's development, had investigated application of Landsat capabilities to identify prime farm land, potential commercial sites, and land values. Georgia, working through Ga. Tech., Marshall Space Flight Center, and the U.S. Dept of Agriculture, had begun aerial surveys of Georgia's peach orchards to study the problem of premature loss of the fruit trees. MSFC aircraft provided multispectral photos and thermal data to be processed through Ga. Tech. computers, detecting stages of decline not visible from the ground. (MSFC Release 75-247, 75-251)
The first successful air drop of data-collection platforms for use by the Nimbus 6 polar-orbiting weather satellite would lead to another first: successful day-to-day tracking of ice-pack movement in the Arctic Sea north of Alaska's oil-rich Prudhoe Bay area. Knowledge about the interaction between the winter sea ice and the continental shelf would be important to government and to oil companies; government would use the information in allocating drilling areas and overseeing their use by private industry. Oil companies would need to know whether to locate drilling rigs on the ice or sink them into the sea bed; whether to bury pipelines under the ocean floor, lay them along the bottom, or run them over the ice to loading areas. The exterior sphere of the platforms, built to be dropped on the ice from small aircraft, had been constructed of a tough material to foil the hunger and curiosity of polar bears, which reportedly would attempt to chew on anything appearing different from the usual surroundings.
The tracking and data-relay experiment aboard Nimbus 6 had successfully completed its share of a transmission test that sent sensor, telemetry, and ranging signals from its near-polar 1110-km orbit to NASA's Ats 6 in geostationary orbit 35 900 km above India. The signals, relayed to NASA's Madrid receiving station, were immediately retransmitted to GSFC. Information gathered in the test would be used to design the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) planned for late 1979. The system would use two geostationary satellites to relay tracking data, commands, and communications between a central ground terminal and a number of spacecraft in low earth orbit; this would increase low-orbit spacecraft access to ground stations from 15 to 85%, reducing NASA requirements for ground-station networks. General Electric's Space Div., reporting on the success of the test, said the quality of all data received was excellent. (Marshall Star, 26 Nov 75, 4; San Diego Union, 9 Nov 75, 1; Aero Daily, 26 Nov 75, 140; SBD, 26 Nov 75, 143)
The Bangui Anomaly-a massive magnetic disturbance in the earth along the equator in Africa, suggesting rich deposits of heavy metals like iron and uranium-had been accidentally discovered by Ogo 1, launched in 1964 with magnetometers that were still measuring the earth's magnetic field in 1970 when the Geological Survey decided to use them for other purposes.
Attempting to measure the ionosphere for traces of a jetstream above the equator, Survey scientists noticed a "kink" in the data and had checked their findings by scanning the region with magnetometers in aircraft. Results showed a magnetic difference so great that it could be caused only by an ore body larger than the Mesabi range in Minn., largest in the U.S. Scientists had deemed the find so important that NASA had suggested putting a satellite in orbit to do nothing but chart the earth's magnetic field.
The anomaly was named for the capital of the Central African Republic, an extremely poor nation almost as big as Texas with a population of about 2 million. The deposits had been localized in hilly regions away from the Ubangi River, so that a railroad or highway would be needed to carry ores to the river for shipping. State Dept. sources said that interest in the region among foreign mineral extraction companies had risen. (O'Toole, LA Times, 15 Nov 75, 1)
Energy from the Mideast had been forecast for cooling buildings in the Persian Gulf countries-but without using a drop of oil, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Solar energy would provide power to sweeten the waters of the Dead Sea, heat water for householders in Cyprus and Israel, and desalinize water for military units in Saudi Arabia. First desalination plant of its kind to use solar energy would be built at Aqaba by the Jordanian Royal Scientific Society working with Dornier of West Germany; the latter company would also build the small desalting plants for the Saudis. A world conference on solar energy had been scheduled for the new Dhahran campus of the Saudi Arabia University of Petroleum and Minerals, at the end of November. (CSM, 18 Nov 75, 2)
A simple device familiar for centuries-the flywheel-had been the subject of a national symposium as a possible solution for some of America's critical energy problems. The first conference on flywheel technology, held at Berkeley, Calif, under sponsorship of the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, had been told that modern materials and design had made possible a super flywheel that could transform the energy picture. The principle upon which flywheels performed-storage of mechanical energy by a spinning wheel-had been enlarged by the use of fiber composites developed for use in spacecraft nosecones that had greater strength-to-weight ratios, being 10 to 20 times stronger than steel and much lighter. As the amount of energy stored by the flywheel varied as the square of the rotation, speed, the limit had been on the tensile strength of the material used; the fiber wheel could be spun faster to store more energy per kg than the conventional metal one, and would also cost less. A super flywheel might spin at 100 000 or even 200 000 rpm. Both the Soviet Union and American industry had displayed interest in developing the flywheel; use of the technology in automobiles would reduce pollution and would represent a safety improvement. The flywheels also could act in backup systems for homes using solar energy and windmills for their energy needs. Further investigation of the materials under stress-rupture tests was being conducted at the Lawrence laboratory and elsewhere. (AYT, 30 Nov 75, L84)
National laws and national governmental institutions were inadequate to deal with problems arising from possible depletion of ozone in the stratosphere by manmade fluorocarbons, said a study by the Library of Congress. The Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences said the study would be "most useful" in its continuing investigation of pollution in the upper atmosphere. The study called for an international system of data gathering and institutional control, at the same time emphasizing the lack of conclusive evidence that fluorocarbons had reduced atmospheric ozone-although it found "very strong grounds" for believing that probable cause of harm existed. (SBD, 4 Nov 75, 12)
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