Oct 6 1999
From The Space Library
NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin named Arthur G. Stephenson, Director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, to head the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission Failure Investigation Board. Mars Climate Orbiter had disappeared on 23 September as it entered orbit around Mars. Goldin tasked the board with independently reviewing all aspects of the mission's failure, to verify whether it had been the result of an inadequacy in NASA's interplanetary navigation systems. Preliminary findings from an internal peer review at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory indicated that "a failure to recognize and correct an error in a transfer of information between the spacecraft team in Colorado and the mission navigation team in California" had caused the loss of the spacecraft. Goldin instructed the board to report its initial findings by 3 November.
NASA researchers at MSFC unveiled an experimental 50-foot (15-meter) track using magnetic levitation (maglev) technology to propel a 30-pound (13.6-kilogram) model of a spacecraft, at a speed of 60 miles (97 kilometers) per hour, in 0.5 seconds. MSFC researchers had sought to reduce launch costs, as well as to reduce space-vehicle size with the development of a maglev launch-assist system. The maglev track was theoretically capable of propelling and releasing a spacecraft at 600 miles (965 kilometers) per hour; wing design would then lift the craft and "give it a kick start" before the ignition of the rocket's engines. MSFC Manager of Launch Technologies Sherry Buschmann commented that the researchers believed the use of maglev technology could cut launch vehicle size by 20 percent. NASA's industry partner in the experimental technology was PRT Advanced Maglev Systems Inc. of Park Forest, Illinois.
NASA released new Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images of the cores of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, and astronomers studying the images for clues about galactic development discussed their findings at a briefing at NASA Headquarters. Two complementary surveys by independent research teams had concluded that the Hubble images confirmed the evolutionary link between a disc-like cloud of dust and gas at the center of a galaxy and a bulge of millions of stars at the center of the disc-like cloud. The central bulge stabilizes a galaxy's development, controls the birth of stars in the galaxy's core, and "holds secrets as to how and when a galaxy formed." Reynier F. Peletier of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom confirmed that central bulges of "more tightly wound spirals" formed at approximately the same time in the early universe. C. Marcello Carollo of Columbia University, who had led a team studying galaxies with small bulges and "bar-like structures that bisect the nucleus," had discovered that such galaxies developed more recently. Both teams had used HST's visible-light and infrared cameras to determine the stars' true colors, a measure of the age of the stars inside the galaxies' core.
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