Return-path: X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 7997;andrew.cmu.edu;Ted Anderson Received: from beak.andrew.cmu.edu via trymail for +dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr11/tm2b/space/space.dl@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr11/tm2b/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests) ID ; Wed, 29 Nov 89 01:27:22 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU Date: Wed, 29 Nov 89 01:26:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: SPACE Digest V10 #284 SPACE Digest Volume 10 : Issue 284 Today's Topics: Kvant 2 expansion preceeding to Mir though with problems Kvant 2 proceeds to Mir, though with some problems Kvant 2 to change orbit Wednesday & Juno mission tests Re: space news from Oct 2 AW&ST Moon Phases Re: Why NASA wants to go to Mars Re: Why NASA wants to go to Mars Re: Antimatter Drives and Area 51 Re: Re: Why NASA wants to go to Mars Re: SPACE Digest V10 #281 SPACE DIGEST mailing list Re: Water damage to shuttle Building a space station--how big and how-to? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 27 Nov 89 23:58:57 EST From: Glenn Chapman Subject: Kvant 2 expansion preceeding to Mir though with problems More details have been announced about the new expansion module launched on Nov. 26 for the Soviet Mir space station, and the problems it is experiencing. Called Kvant 2 now, it was previously referred to as the D or airlock module. Kvant means quantum in Russian, possibly refereeing to a quantum improvement in the station, and hence this may suggest that all the expansion portions for Mir will be labeled with that name. This new section is nearly twice the size and mass of the Kvant 1 astrophysical module currently attached to Mir (added in Apr. 1987). With regard to the problem (see my previous posting) one of the solar panels is now described as partially extended. It has been decided to dock Kvant 2 to Mir with the panel in the current state. There probably the cosmonauts will try and correct the problem manually via a space walk. One interesting point, there was considerable coverage of this flight on their international shortwave service. However on Vremya (time), their nightly TV news hour for Nov. 27, there was no long article on the situation (please note I scan tapes of the news so that I may have fast forwarded past some purely verbal comment with no background pictures). Note though that the lift off was shown live on their television (which has become standard now in these days of Glasnost for space missions). One point was a cryptic comment made on the shortwave report (Nov. 27) that "another space craft will be launched in the wake of Kvant." This may refer either to the Progress M-2 cargo craft to be sent up in mid December, or the T module (Kvant 3?) slated for an end of January flight. From the tone of the broadcasts it did not seem that they were too worried about the problem, hence it may just require Alexander Viktorenko and Alexander Serebrov (who have been up there for 82 days now) go out and give the panel a kick. We will see next week (hope someone else will report on that during my trip - I always seem to travel during important missions). Glenn Chapman MIT Lincoln Lab ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Nov 89 00:03:26 EST From: Glenn Chapman Subject: Kvant 2 proceeds to Mir, though with some problems More details have been announced about the new expansion module launched on Nov. 26 for the Soviet Mir space station, and the problems it is experiencing. Called Kvant 2 now, it was previously referred to as the D or airlock module. Kvant means quantum in Russian, possibly refereeing to a quantum improvement in the station, and hence this may suggest that all the expansion portions for Mir will be labeled with that name. This new section is nearly twice the size and mass of the Kvant 1 astrophysical module currently attached to Mir (added in Apr. 1987). With regard to the problem (see my previous posting) one of the solar panels is now described as partially extended. It has been decided to dock Kvant 2 to Mir with the panel in the current state. There probably the cosmonauts will try and correct the problem manually via a space walk. One interesting point, there was considerable coverage of this flight on their international shortwave service. However on Vremya (time), their nightly TV news hour for Nov. 27, there was no long article on the situation (please note I scan tapes of the news so that I may have fast forwarded past some purely verbal comment with no background pictures). Note though that the lift off was shown live on their television (which has become standard now in these days of Glasnost for space missions). One point was a cryptic comment made on the shortwave report (Nov. 27) that "another space craft will be launched in the wake of Kvant." This may refer either to the Progress M-2 cargo craft to be sent up in mid December, or the T module (Kvant 3?) slated for an end of January flight. From the tone of the broadcasts it did not seem that they were too worried about the problem, hence it may just require Alexander Viktorenko and Alexander Serebrov (who have been up there for 82 days now) go out and give the panel a kick. We will see next week (hope someone else will report on that during my trip - I always seem to travel during important missions). Glenn Chapman MIT Lincoln Lab ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 29 Nov 89 01:04:36 EST From: Glenn Chapman Subject: Kvant 2 to change orbit Wednesday & Juno mission tests The Russians have announced on shortwave (Nov. 28) that the Kvant 2 module, launched on Nov. 26, will undergo a major maneuver on Nov. 29th to achieve the final orbit for the Mir space station. The partially deployed solar panel (see my postings of Nov. 26, and 27) has resulted in both a reduction in some operations there, to conserve power, and the re-orientation of this section to maximize the sun's illumination to recharge the batteries. It has been officially decided to stop all efforts aimed at extending properly the problem panel and simply dock the module to Mir. There the cosmonauts Viktorenko and Serebrov will try and make the repairs. By the way, earth observations of Kvant 2 show it to be very bright - about the same intensity as Venus. One final point earlier this month Mir was in a 404 x 396 Km (253 x 248 mi.) orbit, the highest ever for a manned soviet space station (according to Soviet Aerospace, Nov. 13). Space Commerce Corp. has signed Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing to a contract to supply special advertising signs on the sides of the Proton booster and in general at Baikonur. The contract calls for 3M to get a percentage of any signs sold. (Satellite News Nov. 20) The Soviets have announced that starting in January the Baikonur Cosmodrome will be open year round for visits by tourists. France and the USSR have decided that the 1992 joint mission to Mir will be a two week mission. (Soviet Aerospace, Nov. 13) An excellent description of the rigors of testing prospective astronauts for the UK/Soviet Juno mission is given in the New Scientist Nov. 25 article entitled "Knocking the stuffing out of the Right Stuff" by Jeremy Curtis, a candidate who survived to final set of tests. Curtis, who designs space instrumentation, comments that to build satellite equipment you design conservatively (using older technology because it must last), duplicate components, study all parts of the manufacturing process and create a pile of paper that documents the device that almost exceeds the caloric value of the rocket fuel to lift the satellite. By comparison all you can do with humans (or some product that you have some question about its reliability) is to test a large number of them to near destruction until you find the ones that work, keeping a few spares around in case even those fail on you at the last moment. In summary, after the usual general health and physiological tests they really got down to business. First hot and cold water was put in their ears to check for balance. Then tests for latent epilepsy, X rays examinations, and pulse monitoring for 24 hours. The Soviet doctors took an extreme interest in the whole digestive track, shoving both chemicals and mechanical/fiber optical probes up the openings at both ends. This was followed by altitude chamber examinations, and centrifuge tests at 8 G's (5 G's while siting up). Finally there were Coriolis tests where they were blindfolded, spun in a chair about their head at a revolution every 2 seconds, then forced to sit up every 7 sec. for a minute. He survived 20 minutes of this before he became too sick to take it. Currently Curtis is helping with the preparations for the mission. This is a wonderfully written article, full of humor and insight, and I urge everyone who thinks about being an astronaut/cosmonaut to get hold of a copy. Glenn Chapman MIT Lincoln Lab ------------------------------ Date: 28 Nov 89 06:09:57 GMT From: cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: space news from Oct 2 AW&ST In article <4300@helios.ee.lbl.gov> mikec@ux1.lbl.gov (Mike Chin) writes: >Why is 20 kHz bad? I vaguely remember an article in Powertecnics describing >this system, but I wasn't aware of any controversy. The 20kHz power system was bad because it was new technology for the sake of new technology, instead of new technology for the sake of a working space station. It did promise some modest improvements in weight. In return, it demanded that all power equipment be developed from scratch, specially for the space station. Not even the light bulbs would be standard. The obvious alternative -- use 400Hz aircraft systems -- would have been slightly heavier but vastly cheaper, because much of the hardware could be had off the shelf and all the design issues were fully understood. >I was involved in a Explorer sat project where all voltages were derived >from a 28V bus; designing the DC-DC converters was a major effort (luckily >not done by me). I agree that the switch to DC sounds dumb, although I haven't seen a detailed technical explanation of the tradeoffs. As I said, I suspect it's a face-saving maneuver for someone. -- That's not a joke, that's | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology NASA. -Nick Szabo | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 28 Nov 89 04:47:52 GMT From: super!chris@uunet.uu.net (Chris P. Ross) Subject: Moon Phases Hello. I am looking for a program that will give the phase of the moon at any particular time, or better yet, will give the exact time of each full moon. I have a Moontool program that will run in a Suntools environ- ment, but would like a version of the same program that will run outside of a Sun environment. If anyone has a program that will fulfill these specs, please send mail to me at chris@super.org. Thank you for any and all help. - Chris -- -=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=- Chris P. Ross @ SRC | Internet: chris@super.org "There can be only one..." | UUCP : uunet!super!chris -=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=- ------------------------------ Date: 28 Nov 89 19:58:08 GMT From: att!cbnewsc!dhp@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (douglas.h.price) Subject: Re: Why NASA wants to go to Mars > >With this latest news that it will cost $400 billion to put 4 people >on Mars... > >Jeff Goldader University of Hawaii $400 billion applies if we continue to use 'standard' chemical rocket technology to get to Mars. If I invoke the nuclear propulsion technologies (eeek! the dreaded 'N' word!) the cost drops quickly to about $150 billion with our current understanding of the life support issues and the launch of all mass for the mission from earth. This is obviously a mite easier to digest. As as been noted in the NIMF proposal from Martin Marietta, in some mission scenarios you can do the entire mission with a single Shuttle-C launch! That's cheap! But due to the politics of the situation (see the RTG battle) there is no way we are going to do it in the current technophobic climate. -- Douglas H. Price IH x3664 dhp@cbnewsc.att.com ------------------------------ Date: 29 Nov 89 02:12:12 GMT From: bbn.com!ncramer@bbn.com (Nichael Cramer) Subject: Re: Why NASA wants to go to Mars In article <1989Nov29.013742.11895@cs.rochester.edu> dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz) writes: >I am amazed that people are supporting a $400 B project that will >send four people briefly to Mars. Even if you ignore science, >what could possibly be the justification for this? $400 B is >an enormous amount of money (for example, it is over 1000 times >the annual US fusion research budget). Or, to give it a slightly more human face: ~$5000 dollars for every family in the country. NICHAEL ------------------------------ Date: 28 Nov 89 19:54:40 GMT From: bfmny0!tneff@uunet.uu.net (Tom Neff) Subject: Re: Antimatter Drives and Area 51 In article HIGGINS@FNAL.BITNET (W.T. Higgins) writes: | Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bust. We showered muons on our 115 | sample rods for weeks on end. The decay chain ends, after a rather | short time, at 106Pd. And Pd has a tremendous affinity for hydrogen, and | anti-hydrogen. We had made a bunch of antimatter, but we couldn't get | it out. The deuterons were stuck within the Pd lattice. All we could | collect were a few deuterons coming off atoms on the surface, and | positrons, which we can get anywhere. And instead of an exotic heavy | element, we were left with an inert lump of a metal anybody can buy on | the commodities market. Remember the joke about the alchemist who could | turn gold into lead? Fools! I can't believe nobody thought to try using the deuteron-rich Pd rods as electrodes for cold fusion! Must I think of *everything* around here? :-) -- "Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you | Tom Neff will -- that will uncover a lot of things. | tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET You open that scab, there's a hell of a lot of things... This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves." -- RN 6/23/72 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Nov 89 11:28:48 PST From: Peter Scott Subject: Re: Re: Why NASA wants to go to Mars groucho!steve@handies.ucar.edu (Steve Emmerson) writes: >Our exploration of space is currently being funded, almost exclusively, >by the national government at the taxpayers expense. In my opinion, it >doesn't appear to have a clear profit motive (except for the aerospace >industries ;-) and seems to have a rather weak scientific motive as >well. Why should it have a profit motive? Granted this governs most of our activities, but might there not be a little more to human nature than the desire to turn a buck? Not a lot of profit motive in climbing Everest (I doubt they did it for the TV rights), but it happened anyway. Peter Scott (pjs@grouch.jpl.nasa.gov) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Nov 89 22:47:02 EST From: Leonard Abbey Subject: Re: SPACE Digest V10 #281 I understand that Sky & Telescope will be marketing a Mars globe in the near future. Price, as yet, unannounced. Leonard Abbey Georgia Tech Research Institute labbey@gtri01.gatech.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Nov 89 09:18:04 CST From: lfa@vielle.cray.com (Lou Adornato) Subject: SPACE DIGEST mailing list Please add my name to the SPACE DIGEST mailing list Thank you. ------------------------------ Date: 28 Nov 89 18:12:06 GMT From: swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@ucsd.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Water damage to shuttle In article <8911280148.AA08626@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov> roberts@CMR.NCSL.NIST.GOV (John Roberts) writes: >>NASA assesses water damage to Columbia after accidental activation Sept 24 >>of a fire-extinguisher water-deluge system.... > >In what way could the water-deluge system be more harmful to a shuttle than >the heavy rain and wind of a thunderstorm? ... The obvious: they don't have access doors open when they fly through a thunderstorm. (In fact, they make strenuous efforts to avoid flying through thunderstorms at all.) On the ground, the shuttles are protected fairly well; even on the pad, there are weather-protection shields. -- That's not a joke, that's | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology NASA. -Nick Szabo | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 28 Nov 89 20:51:26 GMT From: mailrus!uflorida!mephisto!prism!ce202a2@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (THOMAS, PETE (TEACHING ASSISTANT)) Subject: Building a space station--how big and how-to? Well, I expect the opinions on this one are going to vary vastly. At age nine I decided that I was going to build a space station. Now that I am at Georgia Tech and embarking on my aerospace education, it is time to start researching and building this dream into a reality. So, I'm going to start out with a question to the net: If the goals of this space station are to: a) provide real manufacturing capabilities in orbit b) give a stable base for research efforts c) be a "dry-dock" for construction or re-assembly of other orbital structures, interplanetary missions, etc. d) be a permament, and comfortable residence for its inhabitants What do I need to do to fully develop this station? Time, money, people, resources--the whole process. Let's put this out as a thought experiment for the group here to toy with--I consider this as the brainstorming step in an effort to begin the design process early. When I am in a position to start this thing, I do not intend to do it cold. I would appreciate either discussion on this newsgroup or email responses (regular summaries will be provided). Why not a manned city in space? To do the real work I envision would take upwards from 400, as far as I can estimate. Go to it. -- Peter L. Thomas (E GR 1170Z{1,2}, UTA) "Figures never lie, but liars always figure." Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332 Internet: {gt5139c,ce202a2}@prism.gatech.edu ------------------------------ End of SPACE Digest V10 #284 *******************