Sep 10 2002
From The Space Library
NASA announced the appointment of two senior managers as part of its new approach to program management. James W. Kennedy, Deputy Center Director of NASA's MSFC, became Deputy Center Director of NASA's KSC, and David A. King, Director of Shuttle Processing at KSC, assumed the post of Deputy Center Director of MSFC. The appointments were the result of Administrator Sean O’Keefe's “One NASA” approach, a method of program management emphasizing enhanced collaboration, communication, and coordination among NASA's facilities, to attain common goals. Deputy Center Directors Kennedy and King would share management responsibilities with the center directors of their respective facilities. (NASA, “NASA Senior Official Appointments Emphasize 'One NASA' Management Approach,” news release 02-172, 10 September 2002.)
NASA scientist Zdenek Sekanina published new findings challenging existing ideas about comets. Existing theory had posited that comets rarely break up and that, when they do, the fragmentation usually occurs in close proximity to the Sun. However, basing his research on the analysis of images taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), operated jointly by NASA and ESA, Sekanina had discovered that comets fragment throughout their lifetimes, often at distances far from the Sun. Moreover, Sekanina had found that such fragmentation generally occurs in a somewhat orderly pattern, with a single comet fragmenting into clusters of smaller comets. Sekanina had analyzed a type of very small comet called a sungrazer and discovered that sungrazers are actually fragments of other comets that have broken apart during a previous encounter with the Sun. Moreover, he had found that sungrazers continue to break into pieces throughout their orbits around the Sun. Sekanina had also examined another type of comet~57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delaporte, finding that this type of comet shows the same pattern of fragmenting into smaller comets as it moves farther from the Sun. (NASA, “Comets Break Up Far and Near,” news release 02-158, 5 September 2002; Zdenek Sekanina, “Runaway Fragmentation of Sungrazing Comets Observed with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory,” Astrophysical Journal 576, no. 2 (10 September 2002): 1085-1089.)
NASA announced the selection of TRW Inc. to lead the team to build the HST's successor, a new space-based observatory planned to launch in 2010. NASA planned to call the new satellite the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), in honor of former NASA Administrator James E. Webb. Under the US$824.8 million contract, TRW and its partner organizations would build an observatory capable of viewing deeper into space than the HST. The telescope's main mirror would unfold to a diameter of at least 20 feet (6.1 meters), thereby providing six times more light-gathering area than the HST, which had an 8-foot (2.4-meter) primary mirror. The telescope would also have instruments highly sensitive to infrared light, which would help astronomers understand the universe's creation and evolution. In addition, NASA planned for the new telescope to orbit 940,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, within the second Lagrange point or L2, where a spacecraft maintains a balance between the gravity of the Sun and of Earth. Although the L2 orbit would be too far from Earth to allow astronauts to service the observatory, it would enable the observatory to cool to very low temperatures without the use of complex refrigeration equipment. (NASA, “NASA Announces Contract for Next-Generation Space Telescope Named After Space Pioneer,” news release 02-171, 10 September 2002.)
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