Aug 20 1977
From The Space Library
Today newspaper reported that two USAF fighter planes had dropped about 20 bombs July 8 across a lake bed runway used by aircraft from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which operates for NASA the Deep Space Network antennas at Goldstone. NASA and the Department of Defense had been at odds over the Mojave desert airspace, and "the military is winning," the paper said.
Twice in the past 6mo a B-1 bomber had narrowly missed the multimillion-dollar tracking antennas, and over the past yr USAF planes with electronic devices had been jamming space signals to and from Goldstone. In the July 8 incident, all bombs from the USAF planes had fallen no more than half a mile from the 5 big-dish antennas serving as the sole links to satellites in orbit around the earth, the sun, and the planet Mars and to one spacecraft headed for the planet Saturn.
The commandant of the Marine base at El Toro, where the planes came from, had grounded the pilots for 2wk, blaming the incident on "navigation error" and misreading of the target. However, on July 22, the B-1 bomber that had previously buzzed the Goldstone station flew with its chase plane low over the heads of station technicians to check the sky for radio interference from other military craft. According to JPL officials, the B-1 was "far off the course it normally flies on a test run." Fighter planes from the Georgia air force base had interfered "no fewer than 60 times" with Goldstone radio links to its space vehicles. Last Oct. a fighter pilot had "accidentally" turned on an electronic device and disrupted contact with the Viking orbiter at Mars for more than an hour. Had the spacecraft been in a maneuver or an emergency, the mission would have been lost, the Viking scientists said. (Today, Aug 20/77, 1A)
August 20-29. Two yr to the day after launching the Viking mission to Mars, NASA launched Voyager 2 at 10:29am EDT from ETR on a Titan IIIE-Centaur. Countdown was smooth except for a brief hold to check the status of a valve. Minutes after launch, problems began to appear: a suspected gyro failure, incomplete data transmission, and failure of the boom holding the science platform to deploy.
NASA later reported the gyro was working and data transmission was satisfactory. The boom, which was supposed to deploy 53min into the flight, had not extended and locked. To determine its position, controllers 12hr after launch had activated a plasma instrument on the scan platform and combined its readings relative to a known axis and the direction of the solar wind (data supplied by GSFC) to show that the boom had extended to within 2° of full deployment.
JPL reported Aug. 22 that the spacecraft had been stable since 3pm EDT Aug. 20, except for a pitch and yaw disturbance at 5am Aug. 21; flight controllers were investigating. It reported Aug. 25 that the craft had undergone another disturbance like that of Aug. 21; controllers had ruled out the propulsion module's having bumped the spacecraft. On the morning of Aug. 29, JPL calibrated the sun sensors and removed the dust cover on the infrared interferometer spectrometer. It had tried Aug. 26 to move the science boom to the locked position, but the computer system had aborted the command, showing that a problem existed. Controllers tried jettisoning the dust cover while reorienting the spacecraft, to jolt the assembly enough to open the boom hinge and lock it into position, but this was unsuccessful. JPL had decided to put Voyager 2 on hold to allow controllers to concentrate on the launch of the other Voyager Sept. 5. (Voyager mission status bulletins 3 through 6)
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