Nov 20 1985
From The Space Library
NASA announced it had scheduled an Air Force AF-16 satellite for launch December 12 aboard a Scout launch vehicle from Wallops Flight Center.
NASA and the Department of Defense entered into agreements in June 1962 for joint use of the Scout launch vehicle. NASA and the Air Force Systems Command continued the agreement under a memorandum of understanding dated April 19, 1977, and amended May 17, 1983. Under the agreement, NASA maintained the Scout launch vehicle system, and DOD used the system for appropriate missions.
The Air Force had requested NASA to provide Scout launch vehicles for the Instrumented Test Vehicle Program. The Air Force would pay in accordance with the existing interagency agreements the costs associated with this launch of a Scout vehicle. (NASA MOR M-490-605-85-01 [prelaunch], Nov 20/85)
NASA's Wallops Flight Facility announced it launched at 5:19 a.m. today a three-stage, Taurus-Nike-Tomahawk sounding rocket that left several colored clouds high over the mid-eastern U.S. coastline. The objective of the experiment was to provide baseline data on expected yields, vapor expansion velocities, and other parameters for the chemical release canisters for the Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite (CRRES), scheduled for launch in July 1987 from the Space Shuttle.
The 157-lb. payload ejected balls of greenish-white titanium-boron-barium and barium-cupric-oxide at an altitude of 230 statute miles, one as the rocket ascended and one as the payload descended. The barium clouds rapidly expanded, while ejecting barium ions along the earth's magnetic field to form a visible streak more than 62 miles long. Another red titanium-boron- lithium cloud released at 325 miles expanded to a diameter of several hundred kilometers in less than a minute.
Goddard Space Flight Center's (GSFC) Wallops Range Control Center received reports of cloud sightings from as far north as Waterville, Maine, as far south as Wilmington, North Carolina, and as far west as South Bend, Indiana. (NASA Release 85-148; GSFC Release 85-39)
At the preliminary science review held the previous week at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), Dr. Eugene Urban, Spacelab 2 mission scientist, called "a complete success" the Spacelab 2 mission flown aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission 51-F [see Space Transportation System/Missions, July 29], the Marshall Star reported. "We saw that the majority of the experiments collected a large amount of new information that should be tremendously beneficial to the world of science and technology," he commented.
As the lead center for Spacelab 2, MSFC hosted the two-day conference in which numerous science teams shared early data from the mission. The teams represented the science disciplines of solar physics, atmospheric physics, plasma physics, life sciences, technology research, infrared astronomy, and high-energy astrophysics. Among those attending the conference were many of the principal and co-investigators for the 13 experiments, all the payload and mission specialists, some invited members from NASA Headquarters who supported mission work, and a number of MSFC science and engineering team members.
Some results thus far, according to Urban, confirmed what scientists had earlier predicted but could not measure, while other results yielded some surprises. For example, the superfluid helium experiment confirmed theoretical predictions of wave behavior of very thin films of super-cooled helium in microgravity. But the infrared telescope surprised researchers when it indicated that the "Shuttle glow" phenomenon observed on past flights was weak in the short infrared wavelength region, where the researchers expected it to be strong.
The solar physics experiment also gathered much data, according to Urban. He cited in particular the experiment called SOUP, the Solar Optical Universal Polarimeter, which studied the visible surface of the sun. "We were able to obtain long sequences of high-resolution photos of the solar surface," he said. "We now have the means to study the growth and fading of various solar features like sunspots over long periods of time." An example of the special qualities of Spacelab 2 was the Vehicle Charging and Potential Experiment, VCAP, in which a beam of charged particles from an electron generator passed from the orbiter's payload bay through the ionosphere. "For the first time," Urban pointed out, "we had an interactive experiment with the VCAP in which we could observe the experiment remotely-from the Plasma Diagnostics Package, another experiment we allowed to free-fly and sense environmental conditions. Together the diagnostics package and VCAP found some highly interesting correlations between the man-made electron beam simulations of the ionosphere and naturally occurring auroras. The information will help us understand better how such auroras are formed from beams of charged particles from the sun." (Marshall Star, Nov 20/85, 1)
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