Feb 20 1980
From The Space Library
Eighteen years after he blasted away from a launch pad at Complex 14, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, to become the first American to orbit the Earth, Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) returned to dedicate a marble memorial of his flight and those of Mercury astronauts M. Scott Carpenter, Walter Schirra, and L. Gordon Cooper, donated in 1978 by the American Monument Association but held back for dedication until gantries at the site were removed and sold for scrap.
The Washington Star said the site was now desolate, "surrounded by palmettos and visited only by an occasional alligator or rattlesnake." About 600 persons at the ceremony heard Glenn describe the new U.S. goal of routine and economical access to space with the Space Shuttle. (W Star, Feb 21/80, A-2; Today, Feb. 12/80, 10A; NASA Actv, May 80, 19)
NASA reported that Dr. Cyril Ponnamperuma, director of the University of Maryland laboratory of chemical evolution, and his researchers had recently discovered amino acids (basic building blocks of life) in Antarctic meteorites presented by NASA. The Antarctic program began three years ago as a cooperative venture of NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to collect meteorites under extremely clean conditions like those under which Apollo astronauts obtained lunar samples, so free of contamination that they could offer evidence of any organic history before they impacted Earth. The agency had given the team Antarctic meteorite and lunar surface samples, as well as data obtained by deep-space probes on atmospheres of other planets. The laboratory examined the lunar and meteor samples for evidence of organic material and tried to create molecules similar to those present in Earth and the planetary atmospheres before life began.
Using gas-chromatograph techniques to identify right-and left-handed molecules of amino acids (the direction in which a beam of polarized light sent through a solution of the material would turn), the team had obtained strong evidence of both right- and left-handed amino acids in the Antarctic meteorites. Since all Earth life forms contain only left-handed molecules, the preorganic matter in the meteorites had to be formed somewhere else. The meteorites used by the team were about 4.5 billion years old; the oldest Earth material identified so far was 3.7 billion years old, and some of it contained evidence of organic matter. "The processes we postulated as taking place on the earth before life began seem to have taken place somewhere else also," Ponnamperuma said. "What this implies is that all those events which led to life may be common in the universe, so what we said happened on the earth may be happening somewhere else." (NASA Release 80-21)
The Washington Star reported on a campaign to raise $1 million for a Viking fund to collect and preserve data from Mars. The Viking landers "sitting on the red sands of Mars and sending back information" could keep doing so for the next 10 years, the story said, but NASA had decided that no life existed on Mars and stopped listening to the Viking transmissions. Among those supporting the fundraising campaign was Ben Bova, editor of Omni magazine, who said "the only people who have lost interest in space are here in Washington." NASA had not officially endorsed the effort, but "at least one spokesman" said the agency would be delighted to accept the contribution. (W Star, Feb 20/80, C-1)
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