[The cover story is Pluto Fast Flyby.]
Columbia launch with Spacelab D2 slips, as it is discovered that nobody is sure which type of blade-tip seal retainers are installed in the LOX turbopumps: the old kind, which must be inspected after every flight, or the new kind, which don't need inspecting. The pumps will be replaced on the pad; this is quicker than inspecting them. The problem came to light when a Rockwell crew dismantling an engine unexpectedly found the older clips, and discovered that the paperwork was incomplete. Columbia's engines *probably* have the new clips, but nobody's sure. [They did.]
Crews at the Cape will start unstacking the Titan 4 that has been sitting on pad 41 since August; Titan 4 SRBs have a stack-life limit of 12 months, and this one's launch date has been pushed back beyond that by the aftermath of last August's Centaur failure. Worse, this one rolled out to the pad last summer to replace another that had exceeded its stack life...
First intimations that the space-station budget will be hit hard.
Clinton will eliminate the National Space Council, consolidating space under science/technology advisor John Gibbons.
USAF proposes to kill Milstar as part of budget reductions; the Navy is not happy.
SDIO gets its near-future marching orders: flat budgets, emphasis on tactical defences first and light continental defence second, Brilliant Pebbles to the bottom of the list.
FAA and NASA exploring the notion of using NASA ozone instruments to pick better routes for transoceanic airliner flights [!]. The crucial observation here is that the ozone instruments are good at seeing discontinuities in airmasses... such as the jet streams that affect airliners quite substantially. There is very little other real-time wind data from over the oceans, which is particularly annoying because the long-haul transoceanic flights need it most. A useful secondary benefit is that the ozone instruments can also see sulfur dioxide, which marks volcanic plumes that can endanger airliners.
Major story on the Pluto Fast Flyby proposals. The hope is for startup funding in FY96 to build two identical small spacecraft, at most 162kg each fueled, probably rather less. Development cost would be capped at $400M. Launch would be in 1999, on a pair of Titan 4/Centaurs... or just possibly Protons, which would lengthen the trip but reduce costs. Trip time would be 7 years (12 with Proton). Pluto is the one planet not yet seen close up, and there is compelling reason to do it soon: its atmosphere will start to freeze out around 2010, and after about 2005 increasing areas of both Pluto and Charon will be in permanent shadow that will make imaging and geochemical mapping impossible.
Previous plans for a Mariner Mark 2 mission to Pluto have been quietly scrapped: there is no hope of getting the money, and the flight time is too long. PFF is being pushed enthusiastically as a pioneering case of doing major planetary missions on limited budget and reasonable schedules.
The planned PFF spacecraft is 1.5m across the dish, powered by an RTG, with no deployable parts. Instruments would be a visible-light camera and an infrared spectrometer (for geochemical mapping) sharing a telescope, an ultraviolet spectrometer (for studying the atmosphere), and the usual radio-occultation experiment (atmosphere again) done in a slightly unusual way, transmitting from Earth to spacecraft instead of vice versa. Data would come back to Earth in a slow trickle, 40bps, for months after the flyby itself. The mission needs two spacecraft because of Pluto's slow rotation, which makes it impossible to catch both sides sunlit in one fast (16 km/s!) flyby, but this also helps redundancy [the spacecraft themselves are not going to be as redundant as usual, due to the weight constraints]. The data will be better and more detailed than that from the Voyager 2 Triton flyby; imaging will beat Hubble (even with its optics fixed) starting six months out.
The PFF folks are a bit worried about weight -- for one thing, they only have about 8kg for all the instruments -- but have been reassured by a look at the Clementine sensor technology.
There is some controversy about PFF, since doing it soon will probably mean postponing some aspect of plans laid at length with extensive advice from the science community. On the other hand, there is some feeling that NASA can legitimately exercise a bit of leadership now and then.
NASA is taking a slightly unusual approach for PFF, deliberately looking for new technology that isn't completely unproven but hasn't been applied in civilian spacecraft before. "The way we have been trying to keep costs down is by getting things off the shelf. The trouble is, the shelf is soon bare." This mission can use all the help it can get from newer technology.
Third Pegasus flies Feb 9! Brazil's SCD1 environmental-data-relay satellite is in exactly the planned orbit. Also aboard was a small (32lb) secondary payload, a test package for OSC's Orbcomm low-orbit comsat network, which was also deployed successfully. The one cloud over the mission is that there was some last-minute confusion over whether the launch should be aborted or not, and OSC and NASA are investigating whether proper procedures were violated. The next Pegasus launch, the Alexis X-ray satellite, is set for April off the coast at Vandenberg.
All work is one man's work. | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology - Kipling | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry