Intelsat 6F1, fifth and last of the Intelsat 6 monsters, launched Oct 29 on Ariane.
Crippin replaces McCartney as KSC director effective 1 Jan.
B-2 gives its life for SDI, as House-Senate authorization compromise halts production of the B-2 (as the House wanted) in return for a reasonably large SDI budget (which the Senate wanted).
Dept Of Large-Scale Oops: NASA's TDRS-3, being relocated in Clarke orbit, disrupts commercial transmissions on Galaxy 1 Oct 22 and Satcom 1R Oct 23, with hours of noise, snow, and ghost images on a wide range of high-profile TV: CNN, ESPN, TNT, several movie channels. Industry is seriously pissed that NASA didn't tell them TDRS-3 was on the move; they had to consult NORAD to find out what was going on. NASA is not sure what happened. A hardware failure is suspected of causing the retransmissions. NASA says that troubleshooting must wait "until we're out of everybody's way".
Large article on Magellan Venus results, with several large images. The geologists now have enough data to start looking at global patterns, including the first high-resolution map of the whole planet. There is now speculation that Venus may parallel the young Earth rather than the current one. There are hints that Maat Mons may have been volcanically active within the last decade -- its upper levels are radar-dark, rather than radar-bright like the chemically-weathered surfaces normally seen at that altitude. It might still be active, in fact -- the data from the second pass over it, in October, has not been processed yet, but will be studied carefully for hints of change. There is still debate about whether Venus's crust is composed of a plate system like Earth's; certainly plate boundaries are not very visible. There are various odd patterns among surface features, not yet understood. The youth of the surface has been confirmed by large-scale crater counts, so it is -- or has been -- resurfaced somehow. Long channels, up to 6800km long, simply are not understood at all -- they look like erosion features, but what fluid liquid at those temperatures could run that far? (Lava couldn't.) Areas like Maxwell Montes show slopes exceeding 30 degrees, again indicating recent activity because this is greater than the expected stable angle under Venus surface conditions.
Magellan's second mapping cycle, to end Jan 15, has imaged most of what got missed on the first cycle already, including 75% of the south-pole gap and 80% of the superior-conjunction gap. Digital maps of about half the planet are already available on CDROM, with the rest coming by the end of the year.
Galileo Gaspra encounter appears successful, based on telemetry. There were some telemetry oddities during encounter but they are now understood and can be avoided in future. JPL is considering whether to try to get one image back. [They did.]
SVR4: proving that quantity is | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology not a substitute for quality. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry