Japan's transport ministry wants to launch a pair of aeronautical navsats into Clarke orbit, one in 1999 and another in 2004. These would supplement GPS for more precise position determination.
Alaska Aerospace Development Corp. wins $1.1M federal grant to develop Poker Flats into an orbital launch facility by 1995. The intent is to accommodate high-inclination missions up to 3500lbs payload, with all processing done indoors.
Spysat contractors Lockheed, Litton, Orbital Systems, TRW, "and others" tell the US government: either let us sell spysat systems and services abroad, or watch your spysat manufacturing base die, because you aren't giving us enough business to keep those capabilities alive.
US government bans exports of "sensitive space technologies" to China and Pakistan for two years, in retaliation for China's sale of missiles to Pakistan. The ban will cost US companies $400-500M... more if China decides to retaliate.
Contact with Mars Observer is lost 21 Aug. Nobody knows whether the orbit-insertion burn scheduled for 24 Aug happened, although MO was already programmed for it and should have been able to do it without help from Earth. JPL is trying to regain contact; there are possible later opportunities to enter Mars orbit if contact can be restored.
At 1721 PDT on the 21st, MO's transmitters were turned off, so that the filaments of their travelling-wave tubes would be cold (and hence relatively strong) when pyrotechnic valves were fired five minutes later to repressurize MO's tanks for the orbit-insertion burns. The transmitters should have come back on around 1800; they didn't.
The transmitters had been turned off and on four times early in the mission, for the three trajectory-correction maneuvers and for the pyrotechnic high-gain-antenna deployment. No problems were seen then. The turnoff was in conformance with the manufacturer's recommendation, and similar turnoffs have been done for other spacecraft, e.g. Magellan.
An attempt was made to observe the insertion burn with the infrared telescopes of the USAF's Maui Optical Station and NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility, but cloud cover prevented observations. The odds of the firing being seen were poor in any case. Consideration was giving to using Hubble, but it was in a poor position and would have had to point closer than desirable to the Sun. MO is much too far away for ground-based radar detection.
If MO did not make its insertion burn, it would be in an elliptical solar orbit between Earth and Mars... but if it didn't make the burn, this would indicate a serious computer malfunction, in which case it quite possibly has lost attitude control, and its batteries could well be dead by around the end of August.
If MO is not saved, it will be the first post-launch total failure for a US interplanetary mission since Surveyor 4 in 1967 [well, if we quietly ignore Apollo 13 in 1970...].
There is no particularly good indication of what caused the failure, due to lack of data. One possibility being looked at is transistor failure in the master computer clock generator (the "RXO"). The RXO is dual-redundant, but only one side is in use at a time, and if the backup side had failed sometime between prelaunch tests and now, and the primary side failed at the pyro firing, it's all over -- MO is dead without the RXO. Attention is focussed on the RXO because a similar RXO had a partial failure just before the scheduled June launch of the NOAA-13 weather satellite. The problem there was a defective weld in a transistor; the transistors used for voltage regulation and temperature control in MO's RXO are from the same lot, which has been found to have about a 10% failure rate.
The other obvious possibility is that the tank pressurization failed catastrophically, destroying the spacecraft. The chances of this are considered slim. The tanks were pressurized before launch, and had been left to "blow down" on their internal pressure for the early correction maneuvers. The helium feed was left turned off as long as possible to avoid having the pressure regulators corroded by fuel fumes, a problem encountered on Viking. The large fuel consumption of the orbit-insertion maneuver required repressurization.
[AW&ST's description of the fuel system is sketchy, but fortunately, thanks to a friend of mine, I now have proper diagrams of the MO plumbing... There are actually two separate propulsion systems: a monopropellant system for attitude control and stationkeeping in the final orbit, and a bipropellant system for the big maneuvers involved in getting there. The bipropellant system would be closed down permanently on arrival in the final orbit, because the fully- deployed position of the high-gain antenna is in front of the big rocket nozzles. Disregarding fill valves and trivia, the biprop. system starts with the helium tank. Then two pyro valves in parallel, used to start pressurization. Then two pressure regulators in series. Then a split: on one side, two check valves (one-way valves) in series and the oxidizer tank; on the other, two more pyro valves in parallel, two check valves in series, and the fuel tank. The first set of pyro valves opens first, pressurizing the oxidizer tank and incidentally sweeping oxidizer vapor out of the helium plumbing. Then the second set opens, pressurizing the fuel tank. The check valves prevent major backflow of propellants, but won't necessarily stop a little bit of diffusion, especially when the system is idle. It's not clear to me whether the 21 Aug sequence was to open both sets of pyro valves or just the first, although I'd guess both. Anyway, there's no obvious single-point failure here -- in particular, both pressure regulators would have had to go bad to overpressurize the tanks.]
An investigation is underway, headed by Tim Coffey, research director at NRL.
Russian officials estimate that the data return from their Mars 1994 lander will be roughly cut in half without MO as a relay. The Mars 1994 orbiter's own orbit is not as well-suited for surface data relay as the one MO was meant to be in. There is also some concern that the Mars 1996 balloon probe may have to be redesigned if MO is unable to relay for it.
Mars 1994 is having its own problems, with funding from both the Russian government and western Europe running late, and delivery on some hardware postponed until the suppliers see payment for it.
ESA's Olympus experimental comsat is being shut down. Late on 11 Aug, Olympus went spectacularly out of control, including a 2 RPM spin, for unknown reasons (although it was during the Perseid shower, which is an interesting coincidence). Control was regained two days later, but only after Olympus had already used up most of its fuel. The Fucino team has decided that there is not enough left to carry on with the mission -- it was scheduled to end next summer anyway -- and what is left will be used to move Olympus to a "graveyard" orbit somewhat below Clarke orbit. [A graveyard orbit above Clarke orbit is normally preferred, but the lower one is easier to reach from Olympus's disturbed orbit, and given that there is some uncertainty about exactly how much fuel is left, the lower one involves less chance of Olympus being left in an orbit intersecting Clarke orbit if it runs out unexpectedly early.]
A bad week all around... Engineers from NASA, NOAA, and MM are looking into what happened to the NOAA-13 polar-orbit weather satellite. After Atlas launch from Vandenberg 9 Aug, NASA did initial checkout and turned the bird over to NOAA 12 Aug. NOAA was doing its own lengthier checkout when all contact was lost 21 Aug. At about 1545 EDT that day, power stopped flowing from the solar array to the batteries and power bus. About two hours later, NOAA-13 passed near NOAA's Fairbanks station where controllers noticed that the bird was in trouble -- with battery voltages low and "all kinds of telemetry points... out of limits" -- and did a playback of taped telemetry. On the next pass, about an hour and a half later, NOAA-13 was silent. It is now tumbling slowly, and there is little hope of salvaging it, although NOAA is still trying. The nature of the failure is not understood; in particular, the telemetry contained nothing to suggest an impact by another object.
NOAA-13 was meant to replace NOAA-11, which is five years old and has had two gyro failures (a third will cripple it). NOAA-9, which had been turned off to free up operations capacity for NOAA-13, is being turned back on. (The other operational bird is NOAA-12, which is in good shape but does not have NOAA-13's search-and-rescue receiver.)
Pictures of DC-X's first flight 18 Aug. Second flight planned for circa 18 Sept. The transition from climb to hover is described as "eye-catching": "When a rocket stops in mid-air like that, I expect to see a big orange fireball." The touchdown was rather slower than intended, indicating that ground-effect phenomena weren't as predicted. [To quote my previous signature: "One flight test is worth a thousand simulations."] There was more propellant sloshing than expected, although the flight controls coped adequately. There was more hydrogen buildup in the engine section than is considered acceptable, and changes are already being made to get it under control. The nosecone was scorched, apparently by burning hydrogen caught under its lip during descent; the lip will be removed and the nosecone coated with a fire retardant. Funding for further tests is uncertain, given Washington budget wars: "we're running on fumes".
NASA asks all groups involved in the shuttle program to review procedures and paperwork to determine whether there are any fundamental flaws causing the recent spate of shuttle launch delays. The delays seem to be a chance combination of unrelated difficulties, but NASA wants to make sure.
Press reports allege that the June 1984 Homing Overlay Experiment test -- the first really impressive demonstration of non-nuclear interception of a missile warhead -- was rigged. The Army denies it. The allegations include:
(A) The target carried a radar beacon that the interceptor initially homed on. (The Army points out that missiles on the Kwajalein range are required to carry transponders for range-safety purposes, but notes that a suitable antenna for a homing receiver would have been much larger than the interceptor, and that inserting receiver and antenna secretly would have been essentially impossible, given range-safety rules and the crowded interior of the interceptor. It also notes that no radar-based cuing of the infrared seeker was needed, since it was placed on a trajectory that would carry it "within about 3mi of the target".)
(B) The target carried a heater to make it more conspicuous to an infrared seeker. (The Army states that the target was at 100F at launch and about 70F at intercept time -- substantially cooler than a real warhead would be. It was kept warm before launch to prevent it from being ridiculously cold at intercept time, which had been a problem in an earlier test.)
(C) The target carried explosives to simulate a hit in the event of a near miss. (The Army says it carried a small charge of flash powder simply meant to make the impact visible to range cameras... and that the impact was far more violent than expected and the effects of the charge were completely insignificant.) [It was later admitted that earlier HOE tests had carried a near-miss explosive charge... but it was removed from this one as an unnecessary complication.]
An investigation has been ordered. Fortunately, Lockheed hung onto the original telemetry data from the tests.
[An AW&ST editorial observes that the alleged reason for the rigging was to justify more funding for strategic defence... but in fact, at that time, SDIO was pushing more exotic technologies and playing down HOE and related programs.]
University of Leeds confirms claims that Navstar PRN19 is ailing, which had already been suspected based on problems seen in differential-GPS tests. The Leeds group says that the signal spectrum of the satellite's upper ("L1") transmission frequency is abnormal in several small ways.
The Pentagon's Joint Electronic Warfare Center in San Antonio announces its primary areas of development work for the next year... and one of them is direction finders to locate GPS jammers.
Israel vehemently denies claims in a GAO report, which says the US is not putting adequate controls on technologies and money supplied to Israel for the Arrow tactical missile-interceptor project. The Israelis say that the licensing rules have been followed to the letter, and that the contracts for the project are all fixed-price deals in which payment is made only in return for specific results. The GAO also says that Israel is not doing enough paperwork -- the Israelis say that their procurement practices are "faster and cheaper" than the Pentagon's and that a cooperative R&D project should not be subjected to the full weight of US bureaucracy -- and that Israel may be underestimating the cost of later phases in the technically-risky program -- the Israelis say that the risk is justified given the urgency of Israel's requirement for effective missile defences.
Global Information Systems Inc, a Russian startup company, is looking for partners for its "Coupon" network of data-transmission satellites. The satellite design uses a phased-array antenna for electronically controlled beam shaping and steering, a technology the Russians have not yet used for civilian purposes.
Politics, n: from "poly ticks", short | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology for "many small bloodsucking insects". | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry