Feb 15 1976
From The Space Library
The long-secret site of USSR space launches-previously identified by U.S space experts as Tyuratam, for the name of the local railway station-was identified in the newspaper Kazakhstanskaya Pravda as "Leninsk," in a dispatch on construction of electric power transmission lines. The dispatch, stating that the Leninsk area had been connected to the Central Asian power grid, was believed to be the first in which the name appeared in a Soviet publication. U.S. astronauts who visited the space complex last year during Apollo-Soyuz mission preparations had reported that a city of about 50 000 population was associated with the launch complex, and was known as Leninsk. Publication of the name--which had not appeared on Soviet maps or reference books-was considered either an oversight by the censor or a decision to make the name public. (NYT, 15 Feb 76, 12)
An around-the-world auto race planned for mid-1976 as part of the U.S. Bicentennial celebration would feature a 1914 Model T Ford, tracked by a NASA satellite from the starting point in Paris to its termination in New York City, NASA announced. The car, driven by Goddard Space Flight Center employee Robert H. Pickard, would carry a 13.6-kg electronics package that would transmit the car's ground speed to the random access measuring system (RAMS) carried on NASA's Nimbus 6 meteorological satellite that covers the entire globe once every 12 hr. Nimbus 6 would relay information to GSFC through a ground station in Alaska. The auto race would demonstrate use of the RAMS system for ground tracking applications where transmissions could encounter various kinds of interference; normally, RAMS would collect data from instruments on moving platforms such as balloons or buoys to allow calculation of wind or sea-surface movements. Pickard, a car enthusiast, had worked in the space program since the Vanguard days and was presently project manager for the comsat-metesat system called GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite). (NASA Release 76-23)
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