May 24 1976
From The Space Library
Commercial supersonic transatlantic transport service began with the arrival of Concorde aircraft from London and Paris at Dulles airport near Washington, D.C. The Anglo-French plane had been barred from New York's John F. Kennedy airport under a ruling by the Port Authority of N.Y. and N.J. after Transportation Secretary William T. Coleman, Jr., granted limited scheduled flights into the U.S. for a trial period not to exceed 16 mo [see 5 Jan.-4 Feb.]. The Concordes arrived at Dulles 2 min apart, British Airways arriving at 11:54 am EDT and Air France at 11:56, taxiing into a 'nose-to-nose position in front of the main terminal building. About 8000 persons were on hand for the landing, many of them leaving their cars and walking in on the limited-access highway because of the traffic backup; of the crowd, airport officials estimated that only about 20 were there to protest the Concorde landings. The French flight carried 80 passengers, the British flight 75; both Air France and British Airways had limited passenger payloads to 80 on Concorde flights until they gained more experience with the aircraft's fuel consumption.
The two carriers had selected Monday for the inauguration of North Atlantic service because neither would ordinarily offer a Washington bound flight that day. Air France planned 3-per-wk flights, leaving Paris on Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday and returning to Paris on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. British Airways would offer 2 trips per wk, leaving London's Heathrow on Thursday and Saturday and returning on Friday and Sunday. One-way fare London to Washington would be $633.60; Paris-Washington, $827. The difference would arise from fluctuations in currency exchange. The trip took 3 hr 50 min for the Air France plane, spending 2 hr 53 min at supersonic speeds on the way. The British plane timed on its return flight took 3 hr 57 min. The Federal Aviation Administration had instrumented the Dulles airport with 8 permanent and 5 portable recorder units to measure the perceived noise in decibels (pndb) for a data base on all airport noise and especially Concorde noise. (NYT, 25 May 76, 1; W Post, 25 May 76, A-1, Av Wk, 24 May 76, 27; 31 May 76, 22)
24-26 May. A "new view of Jupiter," as the New York Times called it, was the subject of a 3-day Ames Research Center symposium on Pioneer discoveries. Scientists from NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, and, 15 universities were resource persons for 4 news briefings per day, each scheduled for an hr or more, and 5 science workshops, meeting in the morning and afternoon each day, with a wrapup session the afternoon of the third day. Topics discussed were Jupiter's atmosphere and weather; magnetosphere and radiation belts; origins, characteristics, and composition of the planet and its moons; origin of life on the planet; and Pioneer 11 targeting toward Saturn upon its departure from the vicinity of Jupiter.
Pioneer findings about Jupiter- characterized by low density and high mass, 318 times that of earth, containing three quarters of the planetary material in the solar system-included discovery that Jupiter's Great Red Spot, three times the size of earth, was not the only such spot; several smaller ones detected in the atmospheric flow around Jupiter moved in and out of the area occupied by the Great Red Spot without losing their own identity. Pioneer measurements of Jupiter properties internal heat, composition of its moons-permitted the first detailed calculations of the process that formed the planet. Its history was apparently that of a failed star: it went from a gas cloud to a body heated red-hot by gravitational contraction, then to a 4.5-billion-yr cooling, still in process, that made it resemble a "white dwarf." The four planet size inner moons-Jupiter's "Galilean" satellites-proved scientifically the most interesting; they exhibited a regular density gradient and composition that constituted the best direct evidence for Jupiter's history. The protostar phases deduced for both Jupiter and Saturn indicated that the outer solar system underwent 2 different periods of relatively high temperature. Jupiter had retained for 4 billion yr its primordial heat, which could be neither radiated nor conducted away because of the planet's composition. A "new metal"-liquid metallic hydrogen, simplest of the alkaline metals-identified only inside Jupiter is thought to constitute the planet's interior, beginning about of a quarter of the distance from the surface to the center. As the substance has low thermal conductivity and is opaque to radiated energy, the heat cannot be dissipated, and the temperature at Jupiter's center is about 30 000°, 6 times that of the surface of the sun. As Jupiter's liquid regions are too hot for life, living organisms would have to exist in its gaseous atmosphere. Between the temperatures for freezing and boiling water, Jupiter's atmospheric pressure increases with depth from S times earth's atmospheric pressure to 10 times.
Pioneer data suggest slow atmosphere-turnover tunes of months or years that would permit survival of atmosphere-borne life, said Dr. Cyril Ponnamperuma of the Univ. of Md. Jupiter was 1000 times as large a region for forming complex organic molecules as earth, and a wide variety of environments would be available. The origin of fife on a planet would depend less on huge time periods than on how often nature mixed the proper ingredients in the proper environment, Dr. Ponnamperuma said; enough billions or trillions of attempts could produce a highly complex molecule able to replicate itself. The fact that Jupiter's atmosphere might provide hospitable sites for life raised the problem of contamination of that atmosphere by earth organisms riding on atmosphere probes launched by the U.S. and other countries.
Pioneer also found that Jupiter acted as a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking small dust particles from a vast region of space (comparatively little dust was present in the Asteroid Belt), and 170 times as many meteoroids were striking Jupiter's atmosphere as struck the earth in areas of similar size. Concentrations of these particles at Jupiter would be the result of the planet's enormous gravity field. Jupiter's magnetosphere-a million times the volume of earth's-was found to leak high energy electrons; Jupiter was the major source of such electrons in the solar system, and the sun and Jupiter were the only known important sources of high-energy particles in the solar system. The energy of these particles was constantly increased by recirculation through the planet's radiation belts, said Dr. James Van Allen of the Univ. of Iowa. Earth orbiting satellites and other spacecraft had detected Jupiter electrons as far away as Mercury, said Dr. John Simpson of the Univ. of Chicago; an input of more than 100 billion watts would be needed to maintain the observed energies. Jupiter was also known to be the strongest radio source in the sky, except for the sun; the massive radio bursts were caused by the moon Io moving through the Jovian magnetic field, said Dr. David Morrison of the Univ. of Hawaii. Scientific detective work revealed that the bursts occurred every 21 hr-half of Io's orbital period-and one of 3 places on Jupiter's visible surface had to face the earth, which Pioneer data proved to be true. (NASA Releases 76-80, 76-91; NYT, 31 May 76, 14)
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