Jan 11 1994
From The Space Library
NASA reported that tests of corrections made to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) were proceeding well and that the first new pictures were expected within days. David Leckrone, Hubble project senior scientist and NASA public information officer Mike Finneran at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, expressed great satisfaction with progress made. To perform one of its primary mission objectives, the study of the universe's infancy, the HST must concentrate 70 percent of an object's light within a core image only 0.1 arc-second in diameter, but the HST's previous spherical-aberration defect distorted its 2.4-meter (94.5-inch) main mirror to the extent that only 15 percent of the light reached the sharp-focus zone. Two sets of corrective optics were installed-the Wide-Field Planetary Camera (due for replacement, anyway) and the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR), a two-meter-long set of five pairs of coin-size mirrors. A problem of jittering caused by solar-cell arrays was also resolved, and new gyroscopes, magnetometers, and computer electronics were installed and have been tested. (CSM, Jan 11/94)
Over 200 scientists at a conference at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, planned observations of the coming impact of the newly discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 into Jupiter. University of Maryland astronomer Lucy McFadden, the conference organizer, discussed the preparations. Twelve observatories in Europe and the United States were scheduled to work in a joint effort called the Comet Impact Network Experiment. The astronomers were organizing observations by nearly every large observatory on the Earth as well as by the Hubble Space Telescope, other orbiting observatories, and the Kuiper Airborne Observatory. Astronomer Michael A. Hearn compared the anticipated power of the impact of the comet's train of 21 two mile-diameter fragments in terms of nuclear explosions with that of the 6 to 12-mile-diameter comet that hit Yucatan, Mexico, 65 million years ago. Harvard University astrophysicist George Field said each fragment would unleash energy equal to 10 million megatons of TNT. Paul Chodas of the California Institute of Technology discussed the problems of predicting the impact for observations by the Galileo spacecraft. Both visible, infrared, and spectrographic observations were to be performed. (B Sun, Jan 11/94; AP, Jan 12/94; W Times, Jan 12/94)
TRW, Inc., received a seven-year, $172-million contract to build the EOS Data and Operations System (EDOS), part of NASA's Earth Observing Data and Information System (EOSDIS). The contract called for TRW to build three facilities to deal with terabytes of climate data from the EOS platform each day, as part of an international study of worldwide environmental conditions. EOSDIS would be the largest database and archival system ever built and would process, distribute, and store two trillion bytes of data daily-about equivalent to the amount of information in the Library of Congress. EROS would use a network called ECOM-EOS Communications-to send data from White Sands to over eight centers. (Federal Computer Week, Jan 10/94)
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