Jan 31 1977
From The Space Library
MSFC announced that on Jan. 28 NASA had invited industry to submit proposals for supplying design, development, and manufacture of Space Telescope support systems module and optical telescope assembly. The telescope should permit observation of about 350 times the volume of space now accessible to ground-based telescopes. MSFC said it expected award of contracts by Oct. or Nov. 1977 if Congress authorized the mission and appropriated the necessary funds.
The 2.4m telescope, included in NASA's FY 1978 budget recently submitted to Congress, would weigh about 10 tons. The Space Shuttle would carry it as a payload in 1983, launching it to orbit at about 500km altitude at an inclination of 28.8° to the equator. Once there, it could serve for a decade as an in-space observatory operated remotely from the ground, but would be designed for maintenance and servicing by a space suited astronaut or for retrieval and return by Shuttle for overhaul and subsequent relaunch. NASA would announce to the scientific community in Feb. an opportunity to submit proposals for scientific instruments to be carried on the Space Telescope for its initial launch. (MSFC Release 77-16; NASA Release 77-19)
LaRC announced that Alex Haley, author of Roots, would be the speaker Feb. 7 at an LaRC colloquium and at an "Our Future in the Cosmos" public lecture. Demand for tickets to the lecture, part of a series sponsored by LaRC and the College of William and Mary, was so great that LaRC had shifted the Haley lecture from the Hampton high school to the Hampton Coliseum. Title of Haley's talk was "A Saga of Black History." (LaRC anno Jan 31/77)
The U.S Air Force Systems Command announced plans to experiment with dispersal of cloudcover by sowing minute amounts of silver iodide into supercooled clouds over a sparsely populated area of Michigan, using two small civilian aircraft, one to dispense the chemical and the second to photograph effects of the treatment. North American Weather Consultants of Goleta, Calif., contractor to the AF Geophysics Laboratory, would conduct the experiments to disperse cloudcover that could interfere with military or civilian flight operations.
The experiments, aimed at clearing specific areas of cloud during landings, would occur only on days that were overcast with little or no precipitation, said Bruce A. Kunkel, project scientist for AFGL. Clouds sought for the tests would be supercooled (consisting of water drops remaining liquid though below freezing temperature) so that they would form ice crystals when treated with the chemical and would fall from the sky, clearing up to a few square miles for up to an hour. Some snow might reach the ground, but most should evaporate after falling from the cloud, and the amount of silver iodide needed would be extremely small notwithstanding its visually dramatic effect. (OIP Release 004.77)
Canadians monitoring the mysterious radio signals emanating from the Soviet Union, said to have disrupted worldwide communications [cf. A&A76, Oct. 29 and Nov. 10-11], suggested that the signals might correspond to transmission of electrical energy without the use of wires, through a process developed by Nikola Tesla, Yugoslav inventor who died in 1943. According to a story in the Wash. Star,- the Canadian Department of Communications received a request some months ago to have its nine listening posts analyze the radio signals in an effort to identify electrical energy problems in eastern Canada. By this time, the signals had caused complaints from European governments and were becoming shorter in duration. Although the signals were high frequency (3 to 30megahertz) and Tesla's experiments had been on low frequencies (6 to 10k cycles per second), the Canadians theorized that the transmissions might have been harmonics of VLF transmissions. Tesla had discovered in 1900 that the earth itself could serve as a conductor of electricity, being "responsive as a tuning fork" to electrical vibrations of a certain pitch; he had succeeded in lighting 200 electric lamps from a distance of 25mi without wires. One scientist working with the Canadians suggested that the signals might aid in modifying weather by affecting electrically charged particles in the upper atmosphere. (W Star, Jan 31/77, A-5)
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