[Hurrah, I'm caught up! For those viewers joining us late :-)... what with postal delays and the need to read and then summarize, I consider one month behind cover date to be "on time" for these summaries.] [I will probably continue with the slightly terser style I've been using for catch-up, though, as I'm finding it rather easier to do.]
Vulcain failure investigation fingers LOX pump impeller rubbing on the pump casing, and suggests that design changes made for other reasons would prevent it from happening in a flight engine. The pad-firing tests at Kourou in July will use a flight-standard engine instead of one of the earlier development ones as originally planned.
Surrey Satellite Technology gets contract from the Chilean Air Force to build Chile's first satellite. The construction team will include some Chilean engineers, participating to help build up expertise.
Funding problems hit the planned US/French successor to Topex/Poseidon: NASA can't find $120M for its share of the project, which was to include the bus and final integration. CNES says it's willing to build the bus if the US will help with integration, which should save NASA $50-60M.
Hubble confirms the presence of a massive black hole in M87. Earlier Hubble observations had suggested its presence, and spectrographic measurements of rotation velocities now appear to have confirmed it. "If it's not a black hole, it's something stranger."
Also found: a pair of glowing rings of gas surrounding Supernova 1987A, well outside the smaller ring seen earlier. The new rings are not centered on the supernova, and their origin is most unclear.
Proton launch from Baikonur May 20 orbits Gorizont 42, one of the Russian comsats leased to Rimsat. Rimsat says the entire capacity is already spoken for. This is a big boost for Rimsat (which uses orbital positions leased from Tonga), and also a boost to NPO-PM, the satellite builders, who badly need the hard currency Rimsat is paying. Rimsat says it is happy with the Russian satellites and that they are meeting all their specs, and that despite difficulties, it is happy doing business with the Russians.
Russian managers say that problems are starting to appear in commercial deals because most Russian companies now want 100% payment in advance before delivery. Rimsat is coping, but Intelsat's contract for an Express satellite appears to have died -- Intelsat put down only a small deposit, which wasn't enough to get results and is being returned.
STEP-2, launched by Pegasus May 19, is in a lower orbit than intended. It was supposed to go into a 450nmi circular orbit, but ended up in a 325x443nmi elliptical orbit. The apogee -- supplied by the Pegasus third stage -- is within specs, but it looks like OSC's little fourth stage, the HAPS, didn't do quite the full circularizing burn. There was no live telemetry coverage of the burn, and there is some concern about whether some data recorded on board will be retrievable. Impact to STEP-2 is still being assessed, although there will be some degradation of its results. STEP-2 itself appears healthy. HAPS was used for the flight because the payload was just a little too heavy for a standard Pegasus to lift into that orbit.
HAPS has been used only once before, in the 1991 flight which also did not achieve quite the desired orbit (although that time the problem was blamed on first-stage separation anomalies). There was live telemetry from that flight, and HAPS appeared to have performed as planned.
Tracking data indicates that the spent HAPS is about 12mi from STEP-2, which suggests that separation and a small separation maneuver by HAPS were performed normally. This indicates that HAPS was still sane and still had fuel. The low perigee represents a performance shortfall for HAPS of 10-15%. The investigation will not affect near-future Pegasus launches, none of which is slated to use HAPS.
TRW prepares its fourth "Eagle" lightsat, carrying a NASA ozone mapper, for July launch on a Pegasus XL. Apart from ozone monitoring, the FAA is also participating, since the ozone mapper can also detect sulfur dioxide, and sulfur dioxide from volcanic eruptions is strongly correlated with volcanic-ash plumes that are hazardous to aircraft. Tracking the ash plumes with weather-satellite images is difficult, but the sulfur dioxide is very conspicuous in ozone-mapper images... although the FAA would prefer 10km resolution rather than the 50km of the current mapper. This satellite, TOMS-EP, is also being watched as a test case for single- instrument missions. Multi-instrument missions are cheaper per instrument, and coordinated observations can be helpful, but a dedicated satellite avoids the compromises in choice of orbit and management of power which have limited operation of earlier ozone mappers.
UN sanctions-enforcement teams in what's left of Yugoslavia are using satellite communications to send freight documents that smugglers often alter. Also in use are still video cameras hooked to Inmarsat C transceivers, placed on barges to spot unauthorized stops. Soon to be tried are "tag" devices that record the route followed by a truck, using data from a GPS receiver.
Editorial calling for ongoing research on the dynamics of large solid rocket motors, citing recent failures and suggesting that some successful Titan IV flights may have been on the edge of failure. AW&ST specifically suggests that it would be worth recovering a spent Titan SRB for analysis.
SMASH! "Sayy... I *liked* that window."| Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology "I enjoyed it too!" "Hmph! Some hero!"| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry