Mayo Foundation researchers develop a 0.8cuin GPS receiver, weighing under 0.5oz and consuming 1.3W of power, for specialized applications. (That's without display, keyboard, antenna, or power pack.) The work was funded by ARPA and done partly by Motorola. Accuracy is 100m, and differential GPS could be used. The design could be refined to reduce power consumption further.
House Appropriations NASA budget is relatively generous, $14G, only $240M of cuts and broad leeway given as to where (reduction of shuttle flight rate suggested). Station fully funded.
Senate Appropriations committee, on the other hand, is hinting strongly that Dan Goldin should decide which one to drop: AXAF or Cassini. He's balking.
FAA abandons plans to deploy the Microwave Landing System, preferring to pursue GPS development instead. There is a small problem in that MLS *is* the international standard replacement for the current ILS, and not everyone thinks it should be bypassed. The FAA wants to see DGPS endorsed as an alternative to MLS... but one objective of the original MLS effort was to have *one* standard system for all international airports. Some think the decision premature, given that the issue of wide-area DGPS corrections is not yet resolved and DGPS does not yet meet the official specs for severe-weather landing aids. The British reaction, in particular, reportedly is "not at our airports, where we're held responsible for safe operations".
The FAA points out that if it does need MLS systems to meet international obligations, it can buy them from suppliers in Britain, Canada, or Germany without having to fund development.
A possible contributing factor in all this is that a large fraction of the market for MLS systems has definitely been taken over by GPS already. The big MLS market was not major international airports, but smaller ones, especially in mountainous areas, where leveling of the approach-path terrain for ILS was infeasible or too costly. DGPS definitely does everything those airports need -- approaches in poor (as opposed to truly bad) weather -- at much lower cost.
FAA issues RFP for its Wide Area Augmentation System, to start operations in 1997, providing GPS satellite-health data and (preferably) wide-area DGPS corrections via comsats. The FAA is also talking to aviation authorities elsewhere about standardizing signal formats etc. The FAA hopes to discontinue operation of about 900 ILS systems now used for poor-weather approaches at minor airports, freeing up ILS frequencies for more bad-weather approach routes at major airports (in case improvements to DGPS cannot meet full bad-weather specs).
NASA picks the winners in its smallsat competition: CTA and TRW. Each will build and fly a small Earth-imaging satellite within two years, using innovative technology. Congress, however, is making unhappy noises about the deletion of a requirement that industry supply some of the funding. NASA says that industry was unwilling to share costs when results could not be kept confidential, and notes that the companies are investing some money in the technologies they're using; the Congressional reaction is "[we] know what real cost sharing is and this doesn't appear to have much".
A more serious criticism, levelled particularly at the CTA bird, is that the program is subsidizing specific companies in the commercial remote-sensing market. The CTA bird will fly a high-resolution imager identical to the ones that will fly on two satellites CTA is building as a commercial venture. CTA's response is that it will buy the satellite back from NASA after a year in orbit. [This idea got a chilly reception at NASA.]
Both the CTA and TRW birds will incorporate on-board image editing to remove clouds and replace them with later data. Both will also have a number of new technologies, including GPS attitude determination and solid-state data recorders. The TRW bird will do 30m imaging in 384 spectral channels, plus 5m panchromatic imaging. The CTA bird will do 3m panchromatic and 15m multispectral imaging. Both will have assorted secondary payloads and minor technology experiments (e.g., non-pyrotechnic release devices on the CTA bird).
OSC prepares for the first Pegasus XL launch. The XL has a 24% stretch of the first stage and a 30% stretch of the second, boosting payload 60% (750lb instead of 470lb into a 400nmi equatorial orbit) at a small cost increase. This will also be the first launch from Stargazer, OSC's Tristar. [Too bad it was a failure.]
Stargazer was acquired used from Air Canada, then sold to a leasing company and leased back. [Don't ask me why... some demented feature of US taxes, probably.] The Tristar (aka L-1011) was chosen over a 747 or DC-10 for structural reasons: the Tristar has a pair of horizontal keel structures running along the bottom of the fuselage, rather than a single one on the other aircraft, and it also has an unpressurized hydraulic-service compartment that sticks up into the pressure hull at a convenient point. The result was that the Pegasus vertical fin could be accommodated in the hydraulic service compartment without having to cut into either the pressure hull or the main fuselage structure, considerably reducing the cost of modifications. [Another factor, I suspect, is that airlines are unloading the out-of-production Tristar to rationalize their fleets, so secondhand prices are low.] The Tristar doesn't have quite the B-52's performance: launch speed will be similar, but altitude will be slightly lower, costing a few kilograms of payload. Rolls-Royce has authorized brief high-altitude use of "climb" thrust on the engines, to raise launch altitude somewhat. The aircraft has been stripped down, including removal of all passenger seats except a handful in the first-class cabin.
This launch will also be the first use of OSC's new processing facility at Vandenberg, a refurbished building that can handle 12 launches/yr rather than the 4/yr of the older Edwards facility.
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