Apr 9 1976
From The Space Library
Space News for this day. (1MB PDF)
The Johnson Space Center announced award of a 1-yr extension of the Pan American World Airways contract for plant maintenance and operations services at the Center. Pan American had been selected 13 Feb. 1974 to receive a cost-plus-award-fee contract for operation of all utility systems and maintenance of utilities, buildings, roads, ditches, and special equipment at JSC; the current award represented the second of 2 planned extensions and would extend the effective period through 12 Feb. 1977. Annual estimated amount of the contract was $7.4 million. (JSC Release 76-25)
A "mysterious force" on the moon had made one of the remote-controlled stations set up by Apollo astronauts behave peculiarly, Boyce Rensberger reported in the N. Y. Times. After operating without interruption since its placement on the lunar surface in Feb. 1971, the station went dead, returned to life spontaneously a few weeks later, then went dead again. Engineers at JSC were waiting to see if the unknown influence would switch the station on again. Called ALSEPs, for Apollo lunar scientific experiments packages, the five stations deployed on the moon at intervals since Nov. 1969 had been sending a steady stream of scientific data on moonquakes, heat flowing from the moon's interior, and the nature of particles in the solar wind; the atomic power supplies, designed for a 1-yr lifetime, had proved more durable. The faulty station, left by the Apollo 14 mission, stopped receiving ground commands in March 1975 when its receiver failed; on 18 Jan. 1976, its transmitter stopped; on Feb. 19, the entire station came back to life-both receiver and transmitter working-and one experiment that had never operated during lunar daytime began working flawlessly night and day. Then, exactly a month later, the entire station shut down again. One theory was that the starts and stops might relate to extreme temperature changes on the moon, varying from 121 °C at lunar noonday to -184°C at lunar midnight. However, as day and night had not originally affected the station's operation, scientists could not explain why temperature change did not produce failure from the start. (NYT, 9 Apr 76, 4)
Astronomers at the University of Massachusetts had clocked pulsars superdense remnants of collapsed stars-at speeds over 2 million kmh, making them the fastest movers in earth's galaxy, the National Science Foundation reported. Some of the objects exceeded galactic escape velocity, meaning they could pull free from the Milky Way and spin off into intergalactic space. First discovered in 1968, pulsars were defined as dense bodies in which a sun-size mass had been compressed into a sphere 16 km in diameter. The material was said to be so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh a billion tons. With its collapse, the body would spin increasingly faster and its magnetic field would increase in intensity; the newly formed pulsar would send out electromagnetic signals that pulsed like a radio beacon with each turn (hence the name pulsar). The high velocities were thought to' be caused by the intense magnetic fields, up to a trillion times that of earth's magnetic field: a slight displacement of the pulsar's magnetic field could release large amounts of electromagnetic energy in one direction, upon which the pulsar would move in the opposite direction as would a rocket. (Pasadena Star-News, 9 Apr 76, 5)
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