Jun 9 1993
From The Space Library
NASA announced that astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope had some success in their attempts to measure the Hubble Constant and the age of the universe. The Hubble Constant (HO) is the ratio of the recession velocities of galaxies to their distances in the expanding universe. The age of the universe can be estimated from the Hubble Constant and currently is thought to he between 10 and 20 billion years. A more precise measurement of the Hubble Constant is required to narrow this range. (NASA Release 93-108; P Inq, June 10/93; RTw, June 9/93)
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) discovered a group of stars that apparently had been cannibalized of their cooler outer gas layers by other passing stars, resulting in stellar "naked cores" with surface temperatures five times hotter than Earth's Sun. (NASA Release 93-109; NY Times, June 10/93; P Inq, June 10/93; B Sun, June 10/93; LA Times, June 10/93; AP, June 10/93; Science, June 14/93)
The Washington Post reported that the panel advising the White House on redesigning the Space Station had suggested that the proposed astronaut out-post be launched into a "world orbit" where it could be reached not only by American Space Shuttles but also by Russian, Japanese, and Chinese rockets. (W Post, June 9/93)
USA Today reported that the Superconducting Super Collider, a 53-mile circular funnel being build outside Dallas, might not survive the congressional budget cutters. The 11 billion, over-budget science project was being targeted by congressional Democrats. (USA Today, June 9/93)
The Washington Post reported that two separate investigations of a failed Atlas rocket launch last March had concluded that the mishap was caused by the loosening of a tiny screw that helps regulate the flow of liquid oxygen propellant. The completion of the investigations allowed General Dynamics Corporation, the company that built the rocket, to resume launches. (W Post, June 9/93; USA Today, June 9/93; H Chron, June 9/93)
NASA described the STS-61 Space Shuttle Endeavour mission, scheduled for December, as the "most complicated repair mission ever attempted." The seven astronauts aboard Endeavour were scheduled to attempt to service and repair the Lockheed-built Hubble Space Telescope. Crew members were to repair the telescope's primary mirror, which had a distorted spherical minor, as well as do regular maintenance work on the telescope. (Flight International, June 9-15/93; B Sun, June 17/93)
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