Mar 30 1979
From The Space Library
NASA announced that Dr. Robert A. Frosch, NASA administrator, and Roy Gibson, director general of ESA, on March 29 signed a memorandum of understanding in Washington, D.C., on a joint international solar-polar mission to be launched in 1983. NASA and ESA would each provide a spacecraft, and ESA would supply software and personnel to support ESA's flight operations in the United States. NASA would be responsible for mission control, launch operations, and tracking and data acquisition, and for several experiments. JPL would manage the NASA scientific effort and development of a NASA spacecraft; JSC would manage the Shuttle launch portion of the mission; ESTEC would manage the European effort.
The objectives of the mission would be to study the structure and emissions of the Sun as a function of latitude from the solar equator to the solar poles and to study the interplanetary medium Earth-to-Jupiter and the Jovian magnetosphere. Launched from a Shuttle, the two craft, each propelled by an upper-stage booster, would take a path in the ecliptic plane (that containing all the planets in Earth's system) toward Jupiter, using its gravity to propel them out of the ecliptic toward the Sun on trajectories to pass one over the north and one over the south solar poles, retrace the ecliptic track, pass over the opposite poles, and fly back toward Jupiter. Mission lifetime would be about five years. (NASA Release 79-37; ESA anno Mar 30/79)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
