Dec 7 1976
From The Space Library
The mission of the launch of Comstar B on 22 July 1976 from the Eastern Test Range on an Atlas-Centaur AC-40 was declared successful by John F. Yardley, Associate Administrator for Space Flight, NASA announced in a postlaunch mission operations report. The spacecraft's apogee motor was successfully fired 24 July 1976, injecting the Comstar into the desired synchronous orbit. (NASA MOR M-491-20176-02, 13 Dec 76)
The Peoples Republic of China launched an unidentified satellite from the Shuang-Cheng-Tzu site into an orbit with 483-km apogee, 170-km perigee, 59.5° inclination, and 91.1-min period. Aviation Wk and Space Technology magazine reported that mission characteristics indicated the vehicle was in the 2700- to 4500-kg class and that the launch vehicle was a CSS-X-3 booster. Hsinhua News Agency, whose launch announcement the Tass agency picked up, reported 10 Dec. that the satellite had returned to earth "with precision according to plan," with no further details. This was PRO's seventh satellite launch. (FBIS, Tass in English, 7 Dec 76; GSFC SSR, 9 Dec 76; FBIS, Peking NCNA, 10 Dec 76; Av Wk, 13 Dec 76, 29; SBD, 14 Dec 76, 234)
The flight of NASA's Pioneer 11 into unexplored space above the plane of earth's orbit had confirmed the structure of the sun's magnetic field for the first time, NASA announced. Dr. Edward J. Smith of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory-magnetometer experimenter for Pioneer 11-reported to the meeting of the Am. Geophysical Union that observations conducted from Feb. to Nov. 1976, while the spacecraft was four times farther from the sun than the earth, showed that the solar magnetic envelope had a simple north pole-south pole structure split into northern and southern portions at the magnetic equator by a "warped" sheet of electric current. This warped sheet had appeared to move as the sun rotated, up and down relative to the earth's orbital plane. As the solar magnetic field extended several billion miles over the north and south solar poles, well beyond the orbit of Saturn, earth spacecraft traveling in earth's orbital plane had passed through the warped electric current and detected contradictory motions, the field in the northern solar hemisphere being carried outward by the solar wind and the field in the southern hemisphere reversing back toward the sun. Earlier spacecraft therefore reported reversals in the direction of the solar magnetic field each time the current sheet was encountered, reports that led to a variety of interpretations. When Pioneer 11 had passed close to Jupiter in Dec. 1974, the gravitational effect had thrown the spacecraft 62 million km above earth's orbital plane, allowing it to measure solar phenomena at a point 16° above the solar equator-9° higher than previously possible-where it discovered a uniform solar field, pointing away from the sun. The present solar model would exhibit the warped current sheet about 15' each side of the solar equator, accompanied by small-scale random magnetic fields of varying intensity and direction; the north polar region would generate a well-ordered magnetic field in a single direction, and the south pole a similar field in the opposite direction. The solar` wind would carry the magnetic field out until it met the interstellar gas, perhaps near the orbit of Pluto, where the outgoing north-polar field would link with incoming south-polar field to "close the magnetic loop," Dr. Smith suggested. (NASA Release 76-199; ARC Release 76-85; NYT, 7 Dec 76, 1)
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