Return-path: X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 7997;andrew.cmu.edu;Ted Anderson Received: from holmes.andrew.cmu.edu via trymail for +dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests) ID ; Sat, 6 May 89 00:20:30 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <0YMb-2y00UkZ15qU54@andrew.cmu.edu> Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU Date: Sat, 6 May 89 00:20:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: SPACE Digest V9 #411 SPACE Digest Volume 9 : Issue 411 Today's Topics: News of The Week, May 4 Re: Private spending for space science Re: Destruction of organic material on Mars more on ET contact legal penalties Re: Smart Pebbles UFOs and other weird stuff on this list. sci.x KH12 for astronomy Re: Colonization problems Re: Giotto (was:"Re: Some comments on comments...") ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 4 May 89 22:42:59 GMT From: cfa!cfa250!mcdowell@husc6.harvard.edu (Jonathan McDowell) Subject: News of The Week, May 4 Jonathan's Space Report May 4, 1989 (no. 14) The space shuttle Atlantis was launched at 18:47:00 GMT today on the STS-30 mission. At 22:30 GMT the mission was proceeding nominally and Magellan deployment was scheduled for 01:04 GMT. The Progress-41 ferry seems to have run into trouble after undocking from Mir on Apr 20. Instead of being deorbited, according to NORAD tracking it ended up in a 124x390 km orbit. It then slowly decayed, reentering at 1202 GMT on Apr 25 from an orbit with a perigee of 94 km. This could indicate an engine underburn, possibly due to lack of fuel after the unplanned boost of the Mir station to a storage orbit. The Foton-2 materials processing flight was orbited on Apr 26 from Plesetsk. Based on the Vostok craft, the satellite will remain in orbit for several weeks and land in the USSR. Kosmos-2018, launched on Apr 20, is a GRU recon satellite, for high resolution imaging. It will probably operate until late June. Another old weather satellite, Kosmos-206, reentered on Apr 22. Lots of small debris is also reentering at the moment due to the solar activity. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (c) 1989 Jonathan McDowell, all rights reserved --------------------------------------------------------------------------- .----------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617)495-7144 | | Center for Astrophysics | uucp: husc6!harvard!cfa200!mcdowell | | 60 Garden Street | bitnet : mcdowell@cfa.bitnet | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : mcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | USA | span : cfa::mcdowell | | | telex : 92148 SATELLITE CAM | | | FAX : (617)495-7356 | '----------------------------------------------------------------' ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 89 16:26:06 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@purdue.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Private spending for space science In article <8905021739.AA19290@cmr.icst.nbs.gov> roberts@CMR.ICST.NBS.GOV (John Roberts) writes: >Can you think of a plausible scenario by which private industry would >undertake to send sophisticated probes to Venus or Jupiter at its own >expense in the next 20 years? ... Why assume that *industry* has to do it? What about the National Geographic Society? Or a university consortium? Useful probes could be brought in at a pricetag, even including launch at current prices, that a major fundraising drive by such institutions could cover. The hardware that Amsat uses for Clarke-orbit amateur comsats would do for a lunar orbiter (the propulsion requirements, in particular, are almost exactly the same for Clarke orbit and lunar orbit), and inner-solar-system planetary missions are not all that much more difficult. Jupiter is a bit trickier but not impossible. It *would* help a lot if the launch costs came down, though. But there are few plausible scenarios for such things as long as it looks easier to convince Congress to pick the taxpayers' pockets to pay for it. -- Mars in 1980s: USSR, 2 tries, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 2 failures; USA, 0 tries. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 89 16:37:16 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@purdue.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Destruction of organic material on Mars In article <3017282@ub.cc.umich.edu> Henry_Edward_Hardy@UB.CC.UMICH.EDU writes: >... the display also >contained this interesting statement: >> >>Martian surface chemistry may in fact result in the destruction of organic >>material. >> >The question is, why, and more importantly, how? The sort of highly-active surface chemistry that is vaguely waved around as the explanation for the puzzling Viking life-detector results could be expected to attack organic molecules, which are fairly fragile. It is hard to be too specific, since (last I heard) nobody had a convincing detailed proposal for how said surface chemistry works. -- Mars in 1980s: USSR, 2 tries, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 2 failures; USA, 0 tries. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 89 17:25:22 GMT From: tektronix!orca!tekecs!nobody@uunet.uu.net (-for inetd server command) Subject: more on ET contact legal penalties My thanks to Will Martin for typing in some of 14 CFR 1211 and giving us his interpretation of its provisions. Will said: >Anyway, note the portions [of the 14 CFR 1211 text that he typed in] >I emphasized above. This specifically does NOT >apply to ETs coming in from outside, but only to NASA missions. >Mayhap this info will put the speculation to rest... Now, Will, you should know better than that. . . Here is another point of view on 14 CFR 1211 -- from the perspective of UFO researchers who specialize in using the FOIA to extract UFO documents from the US government. Please note that they imply they have contacted "NASA's general counsel Neil Hosenball" to interpret 14 CFR 1211 for them. The following excerpt is from page 214 of: Fawcett, Lawrence and Barry J. Greenwood. Clear Intent: The Government Coverup of the UFO Experience. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984. 259pp. ISBN 0-13-136656-4. A book based on FOIA-released, formerly classified UFO documents from the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, etc. "A curious set of regulations exists within NASA. Listed in the Code of Federal Regulations since 1969, 14 CFR 1211, as they are known, provide for the detention, examination, and decontamination of persons and things that have come in direct or indirect contact with a person, animal, or other form of life or matter that has 'touched directly or come within the atmospheric envelope of any other celestial body.' Originally designed for our expeditions to the moon and, in fact, instituted only a few days before the first lunar landing, the regulations can be applied to space voyages by vehicles *not originating from Earth,* [emphasis in original] according to NASA's general counsel Neil Hosenball. Theoretically, anyone who sees and approaches a UFO [= flying saucer] and, if lucky (?) enough, is able to touch the object, may be liable for a $5,000.00 fine and/or a year in prison if he or she does not submit to detention. Now, we don't anticipate that such a thing will ever come down upon a UFO witness. It would hardly be a way to reward someone with physical proof of UFO reality! However, another problem surfaces and that is the fact that when such stories are circulated in the media, a potential witness could be frightened away from reporting a UFO encounter. The threat of a fine and prison term for exposing the public to some as yet unknown peril may be impetus enough to remain silent. One witness involved in the following encounter had precisely this fear in mind when he came forward to tell us what he had gone through." Discussion of the December 30, 1980 Rendlesham Forest/USAFB Bentwaters landing/crash case in Britain immediately follows this quote. -Keith Rowell, Tektronix, Wilsonville, OR keithr@tolkien.WV.TEK.COM ------------------------------ Date: 2 May 89 20:17:55 GMT From: jarthur!jokim@uunet.uu.net (John H. Kim) Subject: Re: Smart Pebbles I thought the test was really neat too. Unfortunately, most of the local news stations ran the tape just so you could hear all the scientists and engineers in the background screaming and yelling. I know the thing is for shooting down missiles, but the news stations never got around to telling what the test was for. What was so great about the test that got everyone screaming? -- John H. Kim | (This space to be filled when I jokim@jarthur.Claremont.EDU | think of something very clever uunet!muddcs!jarthur!jokim | to use as a disclaimer) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 May 89 15:44 CST From: Shallow thoughts for shallow minds Subject: UFOs and other weird stuff on this list. Original_To: BITNET%"space@andrew.cmu.edu" }From: usc!nunki.usc.edu!manderso@bloom-beacon.mit.edu (Mark Anderson) }Subject: Re: Censorship ( was Space Shuttle Attacked by 200-foot UFO!) } }>In article <20041@genrad.UUCP>, dls@genrad.uucp (Diana L. Syriac) writes: }>> UFOs are definitely pertinent to Space....last I heard, most of }>> them are from OUTER SPACE. }> }>Most of us aren't interested in hearing about flying saucers, and most }>"flying sorcerers" aren't interested in what we talk about here. }> }>Paul S. R. Chisholm, AT&T Bell Laboratories } }UFO's can't be any more far out than some of the more "scientific" }arguments posted here, such as blowing up the Sun or mining asteroids. }Loosen up a little. } Mark Nope, gotta put in my two bits here, Mark. Blowing up the sun and mining asteroids are two things that are possible, but we haven't got the ability to do it (yet). We KNOW that if you did certain things to the sun, it would explode. Brute force method would be to crash a large body (very large. Much larger than Jupiter, say), and high speed ( relativistic, preferably, probably somthine on the order of 1/4-1/3 c) into the sun, and voila, instant supernova! Granted, we won't be doing anything remotely similar soon, but it still is possible. Easier: mining the asteroids- we could do that by the turn of the century if we could get our butts in gear. I doubt we will, though. Others: mine the moon, move the Earth outward if we have too much greenhouse problem, terraform venus/mars/a moon of jupiter, make jupiter into a small star, etc, etc. These are all possible, and one could research it, and find out exactly how to do it. Then it is an engineering problem. UFOs, though, are not proven to exist. There is absolutely no firm ground to base their existence on. Just because the universe is so huge that life MUST have evolved elsewhere has nothing to do with whether or not that life is going to be dropping by earth. In fact, the very fact that the universe IS huge enough that results have a chance to be similar in seperate places works against aliens happening upon the earth. A couple scenarios: 2001 - Theyve got von nuemann machines out there putting up detectors in every star system they can find. There is some sort of elemental force connected with life (Kirlian aura, maybe?) and they are detecting this. There are worm-holes around all solar-systems which route radio signals to them. Whatever you need. The only problem is this: Any alien who can do any of these things must be quite advanced. If they haven't yet come out to contact us, they must have a reason. If their culture is too much for us to bear, then theyd not want to contact us and destroy us. But any technology that thats advanced enough to travel between stars should be able to quite easily hide itself from us, even while cruising around the earth. But seriously, why would they even have to do that? Im sure one could sit on the moon with a large radio-receiver and get more information than if they came directly to the earth. Over the airwaves theyd have MILLIONS of people working on describing us, while they couldn't put too many agents on earth without notice. UNLESS: maybe they enjoy reading the Examiner, the weekly world news, and whatever else? Maybe well finally be sending off our first manned interstellar mission, and theyll show up and steal the show. Maybe ... Nope. UFOs probably dont exist, and do not warrant discussion. If they are aliens trying to avoid us, I doubt we could do much about them, so ignore them. If they are toying with us, the best way to get them to stop is to ignore them. If there is a valid reason we shouldn't have contact with them yet, the best method would be to ignore them to save our hides (souls?). If they dont exist, why dont we ignore them? UFOs are the realm of the mystical, not the scientific. Lets leave them there. This diatribe brought to you by: Scott Hess, Scott@gacvax1.bitnet ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 1989 20:05:02 CDT From: "Tom Kirke 996-4961" To: Subject: sci.x Can anybody tell me where the listservs for the sci.x's live? I am especially interested in sci.chem and sci.astro. tanxaboonch | All standard and non-standard Tom Kirke | disclaimers, declaimers, and claimers U15305@UICVM.CC.UIC.EDU | apply. We have discovered a *therapy* (NOT a cure) for the common cold, play tuba for an hour. ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 89 16:57:57 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@purdue.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: KH12 for astronomy In article <2354@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> roberts@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Timothy Roberts) writes: > [flaming about SDI deleted as irrelevant to sci.space] > > My last Question: If the Defense community and the science > community are so closely related, Why haven't I seen Quasar > photos taken through KH-12 or Lacrosse Spysats? ... Lacrosse is supposedly a radar satellite, not an optical one, so it would be pretty useless for astronomy anyway. The KH-12 optics, on the other hand, are probably similar to those of the Hubble telescope. But the sensors almost certainly aren't designed for it. The optics are probably up to the job, but the sensors are designed for looking at brightly-lit objects through a blurry atmosphere going past at 8 kps, not for long exposures of faint objects far away. Besides, have you seen *any* photos taken through those birds? Of course not. And you know why, too. If such photos existed, they'd be secret. -- Mars in 1980s: USSR, 2 tries, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 2 failures; USA, 0 tries. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 89 17:51:36 GMT From: pitt!cisunx!jcbst3@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu (James C. Benz) Subject: Re: Colonization problems In article UNCKNG@UNC.BITNET ("Kevin N. Gunn") writes: > > I am interested in learning more about the obstacles we face should we >(humanity) decide to establish permanent extraterrestrial colonies. (I >actually mean permanent, self-sufficient colonies.) One particular >problem which interests me is the effects of low gravity of growth and >development in organisms. I've heard that fetal development in zero (or >micro) gravity results in abnormalities. Does this carry over to low >gravity situations? Does the Moon have enough gravity for normal fetal >development? What about plant development? Have any tests been run on >any of these questions? I'm trying to pose this problem broadly in >order to get general information about growth and development of >plants and animals in low gravity environments, especially the Moon and >Mars. Any input is appreciated. At the risk of sounding like Howard Hughes, I would like to point out in this context that the human body is positively alive with microorganisms. Thus, an extension of this question is, what are the possible effects of prolonged weightlessness on common body flora? Sounds like a simple enough experiment to conduct - a culture of E-coli or something on a space platform for an extended period. Since most of these buggies exist in a fluid medium, the effect of 0G will probably be minimal, since that is really their normal environment. I doubt we can expect dragon-like Aliens to pop out of some colonist's belly, but other things seem possible with a little imagination. I also welcome input. INPUT!!!! More input!!! -- Jim Benz jcbst3@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu If a modem University of Pittsburgh answers, UCIR (412) 648-5930 hang up! ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 89 16:34:14 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@purdue.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Giotto (was:"Re: Some comments on comments...") In article <2232@botter.cs.vu.nl> fjvwing@cs.vu.nl () writes: >|You're forgetting Pioneer Venus and Giotto, at a minimum. >Giotto is functional? Please forgive me my ignorance, but what is it studying after >the Halley mission? Is it still returning data? Of what?What are it's mission >plans? Giotto's official mission plans ended with Halley encounter, and there was some doubt whether Giotto would survive that, but in fact it did. There is some damage; it is hard to say just how much, and in particular nobody is too sure how well the camera is working. Giotto is currently hibernating, awaiting orders. There is talk of using an Earth encounter a few years from now to redirect it to another comet. The first step would be to wake it up and make a concerted effort to assess damage. Nothing has been decided yet and nobody is in a hurry, since orbital dynamics dictate a delay anyway. -- Mars in 1980s: USSR, 2 tries, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 2 failures; USA, 0 tries. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ End of SPACE Digest V9 #411 *******************