Jul 1 1988
From The Space Library
NASA officially transferred custody of Launch Complex 17 and East Coast Delta launch operations to the U.S. Air Force. Since 1960, NASA had conducted 143 Delta launches from the two-pad Complex, located at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. Under Air Force stewardship, Complex 17 would continue to be used to launch Delta medium class vehicles. The Air Force had procured 20 new Delta IIs for Department of Defense payloads. The first launch was scheduled for later in 1988. In addition, at least eight commercial Delta IIs would be launched by McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company, Huntington, Beach, California, from Complex 17 between 1989 and 1992. (NASA Release 88-99)
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California, inaugurated its Mark III Hypercube parallel supercomputer, the result of a five-year research and development effort at the JPL Center for Space Microelectronics Technology and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The Mark III spearheaded the arrival of massively parallel super-computing. Its first module, placed on-line at the Caltech computer network, contained 32 nodes, or processing units, which together had a peak speed of about 512 million floating point operations per second. Three more 32-node modules would be added during the next nine months to form a 128-node hypercube with a peak speed of 2 billion floating point operations per second.
The Mark II Hypercube was being used for scientific, engineering, and defense research applications, including analysis of NASA multispectral space imaging data; analysis of NASA synthetic aperture radar images taken from the Space Shuttle; and simulation of the Strategic Defense System. (NASA Release 88-88)
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