[It's definite, I am going to start feeding in some new ones while I catch up on the old ones. However, there will be a brief delay while I read some new ones. :-) The obvious breakpoint is year-end, and what with being away at the San Francisco Usenix and other things, I haven't read any of the January issues yet. Soon.]
Japan's MS-T5, launched in Jan 1985 to observe Halley's Comet, is healthy and plans are afoot to bring it back into Earth orbit at the next close approach; its instruments could give useful data on the magnetosphere.
Tests of the trouble-plagued LE-7 engine for the H-2 will resume in October. The investigation of the August accident that killed a technician is nearly complete.
Atlantis military mission will probably slip from Nov to Dec after the discovery of cracks in the leading-edge seals on both wings. Cracks were found on seven of eight seals inspected, so NASA will pull all 44 seals for inspection.
SDIO interceptor test fails when Kite-2 test vehicle explodes shortly after launch at White Sands Sept 23.
House and Senate fully fund Fred after all.
NASA is in no hurry to buy Soviet space hardware now that it is available, and expects that any purchase would be after years of study and negotiation. The automatic docking system is of interest, but Soyuz and Mir vehicles are not.
Soviet book publishes photograph of the Soviet N1 lunar booster! The photo is not terribly good and has been retouched, but it's the first actual photograph ever published. The thing looks pretty much like the artists' conceptions. The photo shows it being erected from its transporter.
Oct 2 Soyuz launch will carry a Kazakh cosmonaut, the first, selected well before the coup to placate Kazakhstan a bit (the Kazakhs have long complained that Baikonur should be paying rent for its land and fees for cleanup of the booster stages that crash in Kazakhstan).
Soviet space program in confusion as a result of aerospace shakeups. The Ministry for General Machine Building, which built most ballistic missiles and space hardware, is being dissolved. Lt. Gen. Vladimir Shatalov, head of the cosmonaut corps for nearly twenty years, has been fired and replaced by Maj. Gen. Peter I. Klimuk, a three-time cosmonaut.
Compton observatory is producing a stream of results to puzzle the high-energy astronomers. Head of the list is that gamma-ray bursts are not concentrated in the plane of the Milky Way, as almost everyone had expected. (This means they must be very close -- in which case they come from a totally new and hitherto unsuspected kind of object -- or very far away -- which means the responsible objects are monstrously, almost impossibly, powerful.) Matter-antimatter annihilation gamma rays, believed to be primarily from supernovae, are not uniformly spread over the Milky Way plane but are concentrated toward the galactic center, which fits none of the theoretical models. Quasar 3C-279 is a tremendous gamma-ray emitter, its gamma emissions alone equalling 1000 times the total power output of the Milky Way. And imaging of the Crab Nebula region produced a major puzzle: apart from the Crab itself, a strong source now dubbed "Geminga" was seen... but only by the high-energy telescope, not by the other telescope, and nobody has any clear idea what sort of object would emit *only* high-energy gammas.
Hubble, somewhat in the shadow of all this (this is the sort of output of new puzzles that it was expected to produce, and it has, but on a disappointingly small scale), has another hardware failure: the high-resolution spectrograph's power supply is ailing.
GAO criticizes NASA's hardware testing policies as "fragmented and not well defined", noting that the four different NASA centers developing major space-station hardware each planned to use its own different testing standards. GAO also comments that the NASA center with the most comprehensive testing standards, Goddard, is the one with the biggest recent successes (Compton and UARS).
Arianespace wins contract for launch of two Mexican comsats, partly by offering to throw in launch of a 50kg microsatellite and training of Mexican technicians.
Arianespace posts 1992 launch manifest. Noteworthy are V51 (March) which will be the first use of a stretched Ariane third stage, and V52 (June) which will carry the NASA/CNEWS Topex/Poseidon oceanography mission plus a cluster of microsatellites.
US decides how to move on Clarke-orbit metsats: it will borrow Europe's Meteosat 3 to cover the gap while GOES-I's problems are straightened out. GOES-I's launch has slipped a year to late 1993, and its defective instruments will probably be replaced with those now under construction for GOES-J. NASA will add equipment at Wallops Island to talk to Meteosat 3 in case it becomes necessary to move it further west than its current 50W position (which is the farthest west that ESA's ground stations can see it). This will cost about $10M, and NASA is starting to talk about standardizing metsats, something that has actually been discussed for years but with little progress.
AXAF's two biggest mirrors are tested at Marshall, successfully. The mirrors met the spec on the raw test data, and beat it by nearly a factor of two once corrections for distortion by their own weight were added.
Olympus is back in action, its communications payload apparently unaffected by being frozen for two months while the satellite was out of control. Procedures for controlling the ailing satellite are still being sorted out and availability to users is currently on a "best effort" basis.
Large story on Abraham Hertzberg's ram accelerator at U of Washington, which has successfully accelerated small projectiles to 2600 m/s in a 12m barrel. The basic concept is simple: the barrel is filled with a fuel/oxidizer gas mix, and the space between the projectile and the barrel wall forms a ramjet. It is an order of magnitude more efficient than a light-gas gun and appears to scale up much better. The ultimate limit will be set by friction heating of the projectile in the relatively dense gas mix: when the nose gets hot enough to ignite the gas *ahead* of it, acceleration will stop. The limits are not well known; the first test was only about six years ago, and total funding to date is under $2M. A design sketch for a ram- accelerator launch system shows a 5km tube 1m in diameter, firing 1000kg projectiles that would be about half payload, at a cost to orbit of perhaps $150/lb.
Picture (and not much else) on JPL's 55lb "mini-rover", recently tested in rough terrain as part of an exploration of cheaper ways of exploring the Martian surface.
"Breakthrough ideas are not | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology from teams." -- Hans von Ohain | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry