DC-X flies for the third time 30 Sept, to higher altitude and higher speeds.
ESA gives Aerospatiale the $156M contract to develop the Huygens Titan probe.
CIS uses Spot satellite imagery plus GPS fixes at sites within Moscow to produce the first accurate, unclassified map of Moscow.
Martin Marietta to close or relocate assorted facilities to consolidate operations following acquisition of GE's satellite business.
Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee kills Brilliant Eyes funding while supporting FEWS and DSP. Also zeroed is NASP. House disagrees.
Asiasat and Thaicom settle their long battle over Clarke-orbit slots. Thaicom 1 is on track for Ariane launch in December; Asiasat 2 is being built for early-1995 launch, although that was supposed to be a Long March launch and Great Wall Industries is on the Clinton trade-sanctions list.
ESA finally admits that Hermes is dead. The new proposal, to be presented to the ESA Council on 13 Oct, calls for an Apollo-like capsule with a substantial payload-return capability instead. The capsule would carry at least four astronauts and have the ability, unlike Soyuz, to return a substantial amount of cargo. It would go up on Ariane 5. Also a high priority would be ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle, a small space tug that would be used to move the capsule (and other payloads) around.
The new ESA plan also specifies a redesigned Columbus module, weighing about 10 tons and roughly the size of Spacelab... and including the previously-dead option of operating it as a man-tended free-flyer. As a free-flyer, it might offer better microgravity than the space station, and more important, it would give ESA the option of going it alone in manned spaceflight if Fredovitch dies of an excess of politics. "We are not happy about being considered a minor party in Phase 3 of the station development." If the station does survive, Columbus would be launched on Ariane 5 and moved to the station by the ESA tug.
The background behind all of this is a need for substantial budget cuts at ESA, as member nations continue to feel the pinch of the recession. ESA specifically states that science and environmental missions, including ERS-1 radar operations and the newly-approved Rosetta comet-landing mission, will not be cut.
Spot 3 launched 25 Sept, along with a handful of microsatellites. Spot 3 was meant to go up about a year from now, but Spot 2 (particularly its tape recorders) has aged more rapidly than expected. Spot 3 is still basically a Spot 1 clone, but with some modest improvements: more durable tape recorders, an NRL/USAF ozone instrument, and a precision orbit-determination system. The piggybacked microsats were Stella (French passive laser reflector), PoSat-1 (Portugal's first satellite, carrying a 200m-resolution imager, a GPS navigation experiment, and a cosmic-ray instrument), Healthsat-2 (US store-and-forward digital comsat for third-world medical communications), Kitsat-B (Korean satellite with a variety of experiments), Eyesat-A (US interferometric-tracking satellite), and Itamsat (Italian radio-relay satellite). PoSat-1 and Healthsat-2 were built by Britain's Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., and Kitsat-B used SSTL components.
NASA short-lists four payloads for two Small Explorer missions to be launched on Pegasus in 1996 and 1997: Juno (Joint UV Night Sky Observer, surveying the sky in far UV), Poems (Positron Electron Magnetic Spectrometer, measuring +/- ratios in cosmic rays), Trace (Transitional Region and Coronal Explorer, studying plasma phenomena on the Sun), and Wire (Wide-Field Infrared Explorer, studying galaxy evolution with a small IR telescope). The first Small Explorer was Sampex (July 1992), the next will be Fast (Fast Auroral Snapshot Explorer, next Aug), and the third will be Swas (Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite, June 1995).
Pictures from Discovery's mission, including the latest experimental spacewalk, ACTS, and Orfeus/Spas.
HST's Faint Object Camera images Nova Cygni 1992, getting an unusually early look at the gas shell blown off.
Meanwhile, WFPC-2 is cleared of suspicions of serious misalignment. A test of WFPC-2 and Costar at Goddard seems to show WFPC-2 out of alignment by 8mm, well beyond what its adjustable mirrors could handle in orbit. Several earlier tests had all shown alignment within 2mm, so Goddard officials decided to ship WFPC-2 to KSC on schedule while investigating the test results. The error has been found: the Goddard test rig generated several different images, and WFPC-2 was focused on the wrong one. [Given HST's history, there was a certain amount of paranoia on the subject, so two independent review boards checked -- and confirmed -- the Goddard results.]
Study it forever and you'll still | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology wonder. Fly it once and you'll know. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry