Mar 22 1985
From The Space Library
Adm. James Watkins, speaking to reporters after a ceremony during which astronaut Thomas Mattingly was promoted to commodore and named to head the Navy Space Program Office, said that a Navy oceanographer who had traveled on a Space Shuttle flight the previous fall had brought back "some fantastically important" information that would make it easier for U.S. submarines to hide in the world's oceans, the Washington Post reported.
Watkins said the oceanographer, whom he would not name but was known to be Paul Scully-Power, a civilian who worked at the Naval Underwater Systems Center, New London, Connecticut, said the information was vital in trying to understand the ocean depths. When asked if satellite technology might not be hastening the day when submarines could be tracked from space, Watkins acknowledged that technology was opening some doors on submarine tracking. However, he pointed out that the question was whether doors opened on detecting submarines faster than doors opened on learning about the oceans depths. He added that "we're still ahead of the game in the latter category.
"So the ability to track submarines-we don't see that as being a threat to our forces until the turn of the century or later, depending on what kind of breakthroughs we might find at the end of this decade or into the next," Watkins concluded. (W Post, Mar 22/85, MO)
The NASA exhibit entitled "Living, Learning, Working in Space" at the 36th Paris Air Show, May 30 through June 9 in Le Bourget, would highlight full-scale elements of a space station, including mockups of working and living quarters, NASA announced.
Audiovisual presentations throughout the 6,900-sq. ft. exhibit area would depict life inside a space station. To give viewers the impression they were looking out into space from a space station module, NASA would suspend in a diorama a large model of the power tower configuration space station along with models of future U.S. space science programs such as the space telescope and Galileo. Exhibits would also showcase NASA's latest aeronautical research. (NASA Release 85-41)
The Canadian government decided to join the U.S. and other allies in producing an orbiting space station, agreeing in principle to spend up to $600 million over the next 10 years, the Washington Times reported.
U.S. space officials had encouraged Canada for more than a year to join the U.S.-led project, which already had the participation of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan, together expected to spend about $4 billion.
Canada's science minister Tom Siddon said that Canada's involvement in the space station could produce economic benefits valued at more than $2 billion by the year 2000. (W Times, Mar 22/85, 5A)
NASA announced it had launched on March 22 at 6:58 p.m. EST the INTELSAT V-A (F-10) by the Atlas/Centaur 63 from Cape Canaveral. Eighth in a series of 10 INTELSAT V-type international telecommunications satellites, the spacecraft would undergo several weeks of on-orbit testing before positioning in geosynchronous orbit.
The AC-63, second of the new stretched version of the Atlas/Centaur for which Lewis Research Center had development and operation management responsibility, had an 80-in. extended first stage enabling it to hold more propellants. (NASA MOR M-491-203-85-08 [postlaunch] Apr 29/85; LeRC News, Apr 8/85, 2)
SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE (SETI) Dr. John Billingham, chief of the Extraterrestrial Research Division at Ames Research Center (ARC) and founder of the ARC-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), said at a Lewis Research Center (LeRC) ALERT colloquium that study of the earth's part in the 15-billion-year cosmic evolution held the key to searching for life beyond the solar system, the Lewis News reported. "By studying how our own planet formed and how basic elements required for life evolved, we can theorize that a similar life-structuring process may be occurring or had occurred elsewhere in the universe," Billingham said.
As an example, he mentioned the collection of microorganisms scientists observed in 3.5-billion-year-old rock formations discovered in the marine environment of Western Australia. Scientists could use that data to study rock-like formations on other planets that might display a similar evolutionary process.
Billingham believed that it was reasonable to assume that life, including intelligent life, existed in the universe because, with 400 million stars in earth's galaxy alone, the natural cosmic process included formation of planets-a rule, not an exception-and the basic stuff of life existed throughout the universe.
Because the Viking program had failed to turn up signs of life on Mars, SETI would focus its sights on life beyond the solar system, Billingham said. To accomplish this would require either a manned interstellar vehicle or radio telescopes. The former option would require, to reach the nearest star, a four-stage spacecraft weighing 34,000 tons, traveling 3/10 the speed of light and using electrical power equal to 500,000 years of earth usage driven by antimatter-hardly a feasible option, he noted. However, researchers could design and build radio telescopes to listen to life from other cosmic sources, he said.
Such a system would make use of the microwave window frequency range, a quiet region of the spectrum that provided the best chance of picking up extraterrestrial signals. To accomplish this, SETI's information system would need to develop the technology using the largest radio telescopes to amplify the signal (1 to 3 GHz) and to build a signal processing system driven by a specially designed SETI computer.
Billingham said the biggest challenge facing the SETI program would be identifying the format, frequency resolution, and time of the signals in order to recognize and eliminate as much interference as possible, thus separating noise from sound manifestations. To determine signals of non-natural origin, SETI would apply a sequence of logical tests coupled with a huge computer-based storehouse of information that would filter out most of the interference signals.
"A radio telescope placed in low earth orbit will help eliminate some of the interference problems," Billingham said, "and the prospect of a much larger lunar orbiting radio telescope would offer an even more advantageous interference-reducing listening position that would cover a radius of 1,000 light years." SETI was then preparing its first system radio telescope prototype for testing at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, where a 1,000-ft. radio telescope conducted signal searches. Once fully operational and in orbit, the new telescope would receive signals originating 30 to 40 light years away.
"Either we are alone or not," Billingham concluded, "and either has large implications. And we wonder, indeed if there is intelligent life elsewhere, will it help us understand our own." (Lewis News, March 22/85, 2)
NASA announced that the third phase of the active magnetospheric particle tracer explorers (AMPTE) magnetotail probe, a U.S., West German, and United Kingdom scientific experiment to determine how the solar wind interacted with the earth's magnetosphere, was underway.
Gilber Ousley, AMPTE project manager of Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), said that the first AMPTE magnetotail release of barium occurred March 21 at 4:20 a.m., EST and that the release conditions had been well within established criteria. The German ion release module spacecraft immediately detected a magnetic field change as expected. The satellite would make one additional release of barium and two of lithium (the tracers) into the earth's magnetotail. The U.S. satellite would analyze the charged-particle space environment around the magnetotail to determine the effects on the environment of the injected elements.
Ousley also said that all ground stations except the one in Argentina reported clear weather and that the observatory at Kitt Peak, Arizona, reported visual sighting with the naked eye for about 20 minutes. The airborne NASA Convair 990 and Argentine Boeing 707 observation aircraft had recorded the event.
The first phase of the AMPTE project had consisted of lithium releases September 11 and 20, 1984, into solar wind outside the earth's magnetosphere about 70,000 miles above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Lima, Peru. Results of the experiment indicated that the artificial comet was "eroded" by the solar wind much faster than previously anticipated.
The only scheduled AMPTE experiment remaining after the March-April releases was formation July 13 or 14, 1985, of another artificial comet on the opposite flank of the magnetosphere from the December experiment.
All releases had to satisfy several criteria, including clear voice communications between the U.S. AMPTE science data center located at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab and the German Space Operations Center in West Germany, where German scientists gathered to view the data. The latter sent the command for release through their center and NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network.
Goddard Space Flight Center managed the U.S. portion of AMPTE for NASA's office of space science and applications; Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab under contract to NASA had built the U.S. spacecraft. (NASA Release 85-42)
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