Apr 25 1977
From The Space Library
NASA reported it had selected Trudy Tiedemann, former public information specialist at DFRC, as its first female commentator. She would serve as announcer during the Shuttle orbiter flight-test program. (NASA Release 77-84)
MSFC announced award of a 1-yr $450 540 contract to Sperry Univac, Washington, D.C., for on-site maintenance of the center's Univac 1108 computer system. (MSFC Release 77-69)
April 25-28: Controllers at ESA's European space center at Darmstadt, West Germany, had fired Geos 1's apogee kick motor at 0738 GMT to boost the satellite into a new 12hr elliptic orbit (38 498km apogee, 2131km perigee, 25.85° orbital inclination) that would maximize return of scientific data. Although ESA officials had hoped to delay the orbit change until after a meeting of Geos experimenters scheduled for April 26, the spacecraft's anomalous transfer orbit, caused by a malfunction during launch Apr. 20, had endangered its solar cell power supply. (ESA Release Apr 25/77)
ESA officials and Geos satellite experimenters during a meeting April 26 at the European space operations center in Darmstadt agreed on a sequence for experiment activation and boom deployment. After increasing satellite "visibility" at the Odenwald ground station near ESOC by moving the Geos I apogee from 90°E to 35°E, controllers planned to extend the short radial booms completely and the long booms to 10cm. If this ploy worked, the 20m-long radial booms would extend completely Apr. 30 to help establish the satellite's moment-of-inertia ratio and dynamic stability. (ESA Release Apr 27/77)
Scientists of Geos 1 believed its new orbit, 'whose apogee was high as that of the intended orbit, could salvage most of its scientific objectives, Nature reported. The new path would put Geos 1 where ESA had planned to orbit its spare "qualifications" geosynchronous satellite in 1979; launch costs had made use of the spare unlikely, the report said. (Nature, Apr 28/77, 767)
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