Jan 7 1985
From The Space Library
NASA was accelerating design of an unmanned U.S. space mission that would rendezvous with a comet and possibly drop a penetrator to return data directly from the comet's surface, Av Wk reported. NASA officials believed that this first U.S. comet-rendezvous mission using the new Mariner Mk. 2 spacecraft would be a high-priority item in the FY 87 budget.
NASA planners would probably select the Comet Kopff or Comet Wild-2 as mission target; FY 87 new-start funding could make a 1991 launch possible.
Unlike Halley’s Comet flybys, the U.S. spacecraft in a rendezvous mission would spend many months flying in formation with a comet. Mission concept proposed rendezvous well before closest approach to the sun, so the spacecraft could observe the comet while it was in its asteroidal stage and before solar wind would blow large amounts of dust off its surface. The spacecraft would remain in formation during the comet's active phase and possibly the post-solar-encounter phase.
GSFC and ARC were examining comet-penetrator concept systems that would return compositional data using a gamma-ray spectrometer. (Av Wk, Jan 7/85, 18)
NASA announced it signed with Rockwell Internatl. Corp. a memorandum of understanding (MOU) covering Space Shuttle flight assignments for Rockwell's materials-processing laboratory, which flew on STS 41-D and, using the float-zone technique, grew a single indium crystal with a lattice structure originating from a crystal seed. The agreement called for Rockwell to develop an industrial space-processing program under which research institutions and commercial firms would install and operate experiments in the modular laboratory. Rockwell designed its fluids-experiment apparatus (FEA), the first zero-gravity laboratory for basic and product research in low-earth orbit, to fit in the Space Shuttle's mid-deck stowage area where crew could operate and monitor it. Experiments could range from processing applications to liquid chemistry, fluid physics, thermodynamics, crystal growth, and biological-cell culturing.
The laboratory, about the size of a 19-inch TV, could heat, cool, expose to vacuum, and manipulate experiment samples that might be gaseous, liquid, or solid, and could mix or stir, remove, and change samples during a mission. A motion-picture or video camera would record sample behavior and instrument data displays. (NASA Release 85-2)
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