[Small plug here for another notable magazine... one that may surprise you... "Science", published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is worth a look now and then. It's another expensive weekly, but it has some virtues. The content is basically two parts. The first is news about what's happening in science. This is meant for scientists who want to know what's happening in *other* fields of science. It's some of the best science reporting in the world, much more detailed than the babytalk in the popular-science magazines but still intelligible to the informed layman. The second part of Science is the scientific papers. Most of the time these are near-unintelligible biomedical stuff, total wastepaper from the space-techie point of view :-). However, Science is one of the two or three "flagship journals" of science, the places where scientific headline news is first published. And every now and then, that headline news is space. The detailed followups go elsewhere, in the specialized journals... but the first-look reports often appear in Science. For example, the 11 Sept 1992 issue -- which is what prompted this note -- is a special issue: Ulysses At Jupiter. The news section contains a good overview, better than the ones elsewhere... but the meat of the issue is 50+ pages of scientific papers by the Ulysses scientists, the first publication of the major results from the Ulysses Jupiter flyby. Now, be warned: these are real scientific papers, not dumbed-down popular versions, and Science is notorious for encouraging a terse no-extra-words style... so those 50+ pages make very stiff reading. (Especially so in this case, because Ulysses had no imaging instruments, and the obscurity quotient of fields-and-particles papers tends to be high. :-)) But if you want the real scoop on what Ulysses found, in detail, this is where to look. Other special issues in the past have covered things like the Voyager encounters and the early results from Magellan. Any university library will have Science.]
White House approves waivers of technology-export rules for six satellite projects involving China: Chinese launches of four US-built birds (Asiasat 2, Intelsat 7A, Starsat, and AfriStar), construction by Hughes of APSat for a Hong Kong consortium with Chinese partners, and use of US-made parts in China's Dong Fang Hone 3 comsat. The Senate will object, the White House will veto the objection.
GAO sharply criticizes SDIO's optimistic reporting of missile-interceptor test results, saying it has exaggerated the success of four out of seven. SDIO says GAO consistently confuses experiments -- in which almost meeting a goal is a success -- with acceptance tests -- in which specifications should be met or something's wrong. GAO counters that failures are to be expected but SDIO should not trumpet them as great successes at budget time.
Endeavour goes up precisely on time for Spacelab J, to the considerable happiness of shuttle-processing officials at the Cape, especially since this was done despite several small technical problems and a lot of tricky last-minute work loading biological specimens.
Spacelab J is going smoothly so far, with most experiments working well and serious discussion of extending the mission one day. Some experiments started a day late because of a cooling-water leak, fixed by the crew. The crew has also done in-flight maintenance on a furnace drive shaft, and improvised a ventilating fan to reduce the humidity in an Israeli insect experiment.
Magellan ends its short gap-filling radar-mapping sequence succesfully. 99% of Venus's surface has now been mapped by Magellan, and technical and budget problems make further radar work increasingly unlikely. Magellan's periapsis has now been lowered somewhat for the lengthy gravity-mapping sequence now starting. The one irritation is that the orbit is still very elliptical, so gravimetric resolution at the equator will be 200km or so but at the poles it will be more like 1000km, which is unsatisfactorily coarse. The current proposal for extending the Magellan mission beyond May 15 is a fairly austere one, $30M over three fiscal years, to do three months of aerobraking into a low circular orbit and then sixteen months of gravity mapping to get 200-300km resolution over the whole planet. [I would assume that the emphasis on gravity mapping here is partly because it's not troubled by the technical problems -- unlike the radar work, which requires careful nursing -- and because a better case can be made for that side of the mission being incomplete.] Availability of that $30M is uncertain as yet.
Intelsat awards the initial Intelsat 8 contract to GE. European satellite builders are unhappy; Matra Marconi in particular is talking about legal action, claiming that Intelsat violated its own contracting rules in the way this competition was run.
Confirmation that Iridium is going from 77 satellites to 66, with more powerful satellites radiating more spot beams making it possible to use one less orbital plane. The name will not change. [Iridium is element 77.]
Ellipsat, which plans to use 12 low-orbit satellites to cover the northern hemisphere by using highly elliptical orbits, has signed up a southern- hemisphere partner (Carincross Holdings Pty Ltd of Sydney) to support expansion to 24 satellites for global coverage.
Lockheed wins $689M development contract for Thaad, the US Army's first purpose-built tactical antimissile system. The system will intercept at much longer range than Patriot, thus protecting a much wider area and reducing the chances of damaging hits from debris of successful intercepts. Thaad is given a good chance of surviving Congressional battles even if SDI takes a mauling, because Congress likes tactical missile defence and perceives Thaad as a realistic system to meet a proven need. First flight tests are planned in about two years. The missile will rely on direct impact and will not carry an explosive warhead. SDIO says that the missile and control technology is already in hand, and Lockheed's big jobs will be packaging and software, especially software.
Editorial urging support for that $30M for Magellan, on grounds of good science returns, a chance to experiment with aerobraking, and the principle of not shutting off a working spacecraft which can still gather good data.
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s. | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry