Experiments with transmitting laser signals to Galileo at a range of 3.7Mmi were successful.
NASDA crossing its fingers after an LE-7 actually completes a 350s burn Dec 17; if another test, set for late this month, succeeds, the engine design will be considered fixed.
France and Germany to establish joint hydrogen-rocket test site at Lampoldshausen.
USAF experimenting with transmitting spysat images directly to cockpits of tactical aircraft. Most of the necessary equipment is already in place, it's just a matter of making it all talk together properly. General Horner, head of US Space Command, was commander of air operations for Desert Storm, and he's pushing the idea.
Army decides to run competition of improved Patriot vs. Erint, after deciding that it can't afford to fund full development of both. The Patriot mods mostly add an active-homing seeker, and are already well into testing. Erint is a smaller, more maneuverable missile, and four of them will fit into one Patriot launch box... but it carries no warhead, relying entirely on direct hits, so accuracy is more critical. A series of Erint tests will be run this year.
"Forum" article by Adm. Thomas Moorer, advocating development of floating sea launch for rockets, to avoid bottlenecks and bureaucracy at the Cape and Vandenberg. It's been done experimentally.
Rockwell and TRW get contracts for development on Brilliant Eyes, to conclude with space tests of the rival systems in 1997.
Orbcomm (a division of Orbital Sciences) scores a success in a "satellite simulation" test, demonstrating digital communications via an imitation satellite carried by a NASA SR-71.
JPL has just about given up on Galileo's antenna. The first hammering sequence (Dec 29-30) did produce some motion, but the antenna is still stuck, and nobody is very optimistic about breaking it loose. The one thing left to try (after a few more hammering attempts) will be spinning Galileo up from its cruising 3 RPM to the 10 RPM spin that will be used for Jupiter-orbit insertion. Nobody really expects this to help, but it's easy to try.
Analysis of data from the Gaspra flyby turns up evidence of a fairly strong magnetic field, suggesting that Gaspra's core is probably nickel-iron, a bit of a surprise in what looked like a stony asteroid.
Minor bad news for lunar polar volatiles: Galileo's UV spectrometer found no evidence of extra hydrogen in the Moon's vicinity.
Galileo Venus data suggests that Venus's clouds may be partially transparent in the infrared at about 1um: spots on Galileo's IR image line up with major features seen on radar images. There had been hints of this already, and JPL is looking into the possibility of doing something with it.
Spot image showing the ground fault from the Landers earthquake.
Endeavour preparing for its third flight, carrying the sixth TDRS, an X-ray experiment, equipment for the first of the post-Intelsat experimental EVAs, and the new shuttle toilet. TDRS-6 will be moved into the TDRS-East position, replacing the ailing TDRS-3. TDRS-3 will move to the TDRS-West position as an on-orbit spare, replacing the even more sickly TDRS-1. TDRS-1 will be moved out of the operational TDRS constellation entirely; it will move to longitude 85E, where it will be run from a ground station in Australia as a dedicated relay for Compton (which badly needs lots of TDRS access to work around its tape-recorder problems). This will give NASA it's long-desired complete TDRS constellation, with a perfect operational satellite and a good-quality spare in each of the two main positions.
Endeavour's secondary payload, the Diffuse X-ray Spectrometer, will measure the soft-X-ray spectrum of the hot interstellar gas in the solar system's neighborhood, which is unusually hot and thin for interstellar gas and may be an old supernova remnant.
The experimental EVA on Endeavour will be the first real attempt in many years to do an EVA solely for looking at EVA techniques. The near-failure of the Intelsat rescue scared NASA planners, causing a complete about-face in NASA policy, from "no unnecessary EVAs" to "experimental EVAs whenever we can fit them in". No more experimental EVAs have been scheduled yet, but missions 51 and 57 later this year are good bets. (The rule is that they must not interfere with major mission objectives.)
The new toilet is aimed at long-duration missions, which the existing toilet has inadequate capacity for. [From other descriptions, it sounds like they've basically gone back to the Skylab design, which worked, unlike the existing shuttle toilet.] Another long-duration test will be an attempt to shut down and restart a fuel cell in orbit, something that will be desirable for man-tended space-station missions but has never been tried in space.
Third Pegasus launch (first commercial mission) slips after tail-fin problems were detected early in the ferry flight from Edwards to the Cape. The B-52 aborted the flight and went back to Edwards. The Wallops range, which will be used for the flight, is committed to the shuttle mission in the near future, so the Jan 11 launch must slip at least to the 28th.
Investigators are studying wreckage from the Long March Optus failure. A Chinese farmer reported unusual metal parts in his field, and a Chinese/Hughes/US search team recovered parts of the Long March and over half of the Optus satellite. (The "US" part of the team was government officials along to make sure the Chinese didn't steal any US technology from the debris.) Hughes engineers studying video of the launch have found a "small fireball" near the time of maximum dynamic pressure. The second stage performed better than expected, suggesting that it wasn't pushing as big a load as expected. NORAD has found two objects in Optus B's planned initial orbit, possibly the remains of the satellie and the second stage (which normally fires retrorockets after releasing its payload). Optus is unhappy, but has enough spare capacity to cope until a replacement can be launched... and the contract specified delivery in orbit, so the financial loss is Hughes's rather than Optus's.
French/German team wins a contract to supply Argentina with a comsat, and operate the complete resulting system. The operations contract is considered a particular coup; US companies dominate that business. The team will rent capacity on two of the Anik satellites to get the system going before its own satellite goes up circa 1996.
Rosat results point to greater concentrations of dark matter around some galaxies than expected from other evidence. Specifically, a small group of galaxies, NGC 2300, is surrounded by a large cloud of hot gas, too large and too hot to be very long-lived unless it is being held together by circa 25 times the visible mass of the galaxies. [This will make the cosmologists happy; they've long been wanting to see more mass than the observers were willing to grant.]
The Space Policy Advisory Board delivers a report, which may have come too late to do any good since it's reporting to Quayle, advising cutting the government space bureaucracy, centralizing government space activity, eliminating security classification of most military space programs, extending antitrust exemption to industry consortia, and being "selectively willing to be dependent on foreign suppliers for essential components or systems" in cooperative projects.
Radar images of asteroid Toutatis, which appears to be two cratered objects in contact, strengthening the belief that "paired" asteroids are common.
C++ is the best example of second-system| Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology effect since OS/360. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry