Mar 4 1977
From The Space Library
NASA announced the return to Johnson Space Center of former astronaut Dr. Edward G. Gibson, science pilot on the 84-day Skylab 4 mission in 1973-74, after a yr with ERNO of Bremen, W. Germany, prime contractor for Spacelab (a future Space Shuttle payload). Gibson, a Ph.D. in physics and engineering, had left NASA in 1974 to become senior staff scientist at Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, Calif. Gibson would be working in JSC's Mission Specialist Office, now headed by astronaut Joseph P. Kerwin, M.D. (NASA Release 77-43)
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that, as part of the Solar Sail Development Project, it had awarded 6 contracts to build a spaceship powered by solar wind. The craft, using large extremely thin metallic sails to capture the energy of solar photons, would tack like a sailboat into the "wind" to head toward the sun or would use photon energy to head for the outer planets. Speed of the ship would vary with distance from the sun, following the inverse-square law that solar intensity would decrease as the reciprocal of the distance from the sun, squared. Cost of the contracts for fabricating sail material and designing sails, booms, and navigation systems would total $800 000. (NASA Release 77-39)
A 25-article series in Science News by Jonathan Eberhart on the Viking mission won the 1976 AAAS-Westinghouse science writing award Feb. 22, Science reported. Henry S.F. Cooper's New Yorker article on the Space Shuttle received honorable mention. (Science, Mar 4/77, 864)
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