Letter from Eumetsat, noting that Meteosats 4-6 are operated by ESA but owned and funded by Eumetsat, and that operations will also move to Eumetsat with Meteosat 7.
One of the short-wave radiometers on Fuyo-1 [this may be another name for JERS-1] has failed; controllers are hoping to work around it.
Martin Marietta returns $17M to JPL, this being the part of its Mars Observer performance bonus that had already been paid when MO went silent.
White House struggling to find funds to keep Landsat 7 on schedule. DoD is balking at funding development of the satellite, and NASA is not keen on funding data processing either, but lots of people want it done.
Jean-Francois Clervoy will fly as the ESA mission specialist on the Atlas 3 shuttle mission this autumn.
Soyuz TM-18 docks to Mir 10 Jan, carrying three crewmen, including Valeri Poliakov who is beginning a 14-month stay.
George Abbey, Goldin's top assistant, returns to Houston as deputy director of JSC. And Michael Griffin quits, taking a job with Space Industries.
First release of fresh images from Hubble... good ones. "It's fixed beyond our wildest expectations." Much work remains, but both WFPC2 and FOC images confirm that the optical fixes are nearly perfect, with imaging performance approaching the diffraction limit. The spectrographs have not yet finished focussing and checkout, but their results are expected to be similar.
Concern is being expressed that the Clinton administration so dislikes the notion of space-based elements in missile-defence systems that they may be ruled out even when they are the best solution, e.g. for detecting missiles for boost-phase interception.
Arianespace plans 10-11 launches annually through 1996 to work off its backlog. [Well, those plans will need a bit of revising...] Meanwhile, the first production order for Ariane 5s is going in, for 14 of them. Arianespace signed 16 new contracts in 1993, and demonstrated once-a-month launches in the last four months of the year. The last one, in December, was the first SDS launch, with a 1-ton satellite as a secondary passenger on launch of a 3-ton satellite. A number of Ariane's near-future bookings are for 3-ton birds, so there is room for other 1-ton payloads, suited to small comsats (the December one was Thaicom 1) for smaller nations and as gap fillers in larger networks.
["Ton" here is, of course, the metric ton, 1000kg.]
Phillips Lab's Starfire Optical Range at Kirtland AFB produces first major astronomical images using laser "guide stars" to control adaptive optics. Good results, better than Hubble in some ways, and all the more noteworthy because the Starfire site is not optimized for astronomy.
Clementine 1 launch imminent -- the first US mission to the Moon in twenty years. The launch is set for 25 Jan, the date established at the start of the program 22 months ago. Total program cost is estimated at $80M, about $55M of that being for the spacecraft and its sensors. Assorted problems have been found and fixed in the ultra-lightweight hardware, including vibration sensitivity in the 1-kg infrared cameras, inadequate cooler capacity in the long-wavelength infrared camera (too late to fix -- procedures may be altered slightly to reduce cooling load), and slow star-tracker image processing in the R3000-based imaging computer. Final prelaunch checkout included taking Clementine 1 outdoors at night to test its star trackers on an actual sky -- a test which did find one alignment flaw due to a software error. "Conducting real tests with the star trackers was the best way to see how they worked, rather than rely on simulations, which we tried to avoid as much as possible." (Lt. Col. Pedro Rustan, BMDO mission manager). Final dry weight of the spacecraft was 508lb, including balance weights, somewhat above the original goal of 350lb. Clementine 1 will spend ten weeks in lunar orbit, followed by an encounter with the near-Earth asteroid 1620 Geographos around the end of August. Clementine will approach Geographos from its dark side, with most imaging done after closest approach (planned for 100km).
Clementine 1 will be the first Titan 2G launch after the loss of Landsat 6 in October. Landsat's Titan worked perfectly, and the current best guess is that Landsat 6 had an attitude-control problem that messed up the firing of its solid apogee motor. The motor itself is not believed to have been at fault... which is of some importance because Clementine is using a very similar (although not identical) motor for boosting into its lunar trajectory.
Critics have long said "NASA specializes| Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology in pork"; now that's White House policy.| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry