Dec 14 1979
From The Space Library
NASA announced that it had lost contact with Voyager 1 late December 13 after a maneuver to refine its path to Saturn. Launched in September 1977, Voyager 1 was now 996 million kilometers (660 million miles) from Earth, heading for encounter with Saturn in November 1980. The maneuver, commanding the spacecraft to turn and fire its thrusters, should automatically orient the antenna toward Earth; the maneuver occurred, but the alignment was faulty. The agency said it had had previous problems with orientation.
Several hours later on December 13, controllers at JPL acquired a faint intermittent signal confirming that Voyager 1 had received and executed the initial command signals to switch to the low-gain antenna and put it into a two-way mode. JPL would now try to analyze the difficulty and correct alignment without wasting attitude-control gas. (NASA Release 79-180)
NASA announced that its manned oblique-wing research aircraft would make its first flight December 19 at DFRC with pilot Tom McMurtry at the controls. The AD-1 (so named for Ames and Dryden centers) would use a pivoting wing to reduce noise and fuel consumption. Studies at ARC indicated that such planes flying at 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) per hour would use half as much fuel as conventional swept-wing aircraft. Built by Ames Industrial Co., Bohemia, N.Y., the 907-kilogram (2,000-pound) aircraft was about 12.2 meters (40 feet) long with a wingspan of 9.7 meters (32 feet), and was powered by two small 99.8-kilogram (220-pound) thrust turbojets. (NASA Release 79-177; DFRC Release 3979)
NASA announced award of a $4.7 million contract to Goodyear Aerospace Corp., Akron, Ohio, for fabricating a high-speed image-processing computer (called massively parallel processor) to analyze, data from future Earth observation spacecraft. Current computers had to process one at a time the thousands of picture elements (pixels) constituting a satellite image, a time consuming and expensive procedure. The new computer would use 16,384 simple interconnected elements to process the pixels simultaneously, 10 to 100 times faster than now possible and at a greatly reduced cost. Scheduled for delivery to GSFC in 1982, it would process data in the hundreds of images received there from NASA's Earth-resources spacecraft. (NASA Release 79-181)
The Washington Star reported on RCA's plans to launch within 18 months a replacement for the $20 million Satcom 3 that vanished from orbit December 10. The company said that it wanted FCC authority to launch a spare satellite now being built; a complete search for the missing communications satellite could take several weeks, but so far "contact has not been regained." (W Star, Dec 15/79, C-8)
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