Dec 28 1964
From The Space Library
MARINER IV passed the 50-million-mi. mark on its 325-million-mi. flight to Mars. The spacecraft was operating normally and transmitting items of information at a rate of 331/3/sec. Nearly 10 million scientific and engineering measurements in space and outside the earth's orbit had been transmitted in its first 29 days of flight. (NASA. Release 64-326)
A spokesman for the Senate's Select Committee on Small Business' Sub-committee, headed by Sen. Russell B. Long (D.-La.), reported it would meet shortly after Congress convened Jan. 4 to consider senatorial requests for an investigation of charges that NASA had given away to business firms valuable patent rights developed at public expense and worth millions of dollars. James E. Webb, NASA Administrator, claimed the agency was following Federal law and guidelines laid down by President John F. Kennedy shortly before his death. (AP, Wash. Eve. Star, 12/28/64)
U.S. Navy was reported to be defining its manned orbiting laboratory (MOL) ocean surveillance experiment despite the proposed merger of the Air Force MOL and NASA's Apollo-X programs. Navy felt its space mission potential should be explored as thoroughly under either military or civilian programs. The Navy space mission was first envisioned to involve five major areas concerning shipping: detection; location; identification; classification; tracking of surface and subsurface craft. (Fink, Av. Wk., 12/28/64, 13)
Support for theories that extraterrestrial forces influenced rain and snow-fall was reported at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Glenn W. Brier of the U.S. Weather Bureau presented evidence that the moon, when new or full, influenced the timing of precipitation by gravitationally nudging unstable atmospheric conditions into rainfall or snowstorms. Dr. E. Keith Bigg of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Sydney reported research which substantiated his theory that meteoric dust particles acted as nuclei for ice crystals to form on and fell to earth as rain or snow, with the whole process taking about 30 days. (Osmundsen, NYT, 12/29/64, 6)
U.S. Army announced that the Corps of Engineers awarded a $1,159,000 (NASA funds) fixed-price contract to Carpenter Brothers for construction of a mobile equipment maintenance building at NASA's Mississippi Test Operations. (DOD Release 908-64)
GAO Comptroller General Joseph Campbell said that GAO would evaluate DOD policies affecting nonprofit organizations performing design, technical direction, and systems engineering functions for the military services. "We have a continuing interest in finding out whether salaries higher than the government scale paid by some of these organizations are really necessary and justified or are only a way of indirectly paying higher [wages] for government work," Campbell said. Another area of prime concern to GAO was relinquishment to nongovernment organizations of technical direction and similar activities it considered Government management functions. DOD had already clamped fiscal ceilings on six of these organizations to prevent their growth and was inviting increased industry competition in the areas of technical direction and systems engineering. Campbell told Aviation Week and Space Technology that "if we are faced with any intention to sustain permanently some of these organizations as arms of government, We would have to look into the situation very carefully and thoroughly." In commenting on NASA's approach to nonprofit organizations, Ernest W. Brackett, Asst. Deputy Associate Administrator, noted that although NASA had "inherited" one nonprofit organization, the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it had not and would not establish any "captive" nonprofit organizations. Two other nonprofit organizations were also performing work for NASA-RAND Corp., with contracts totaling $3-3 million, and MIT's Lincoln Laboratories, with contracts totaling over $7 million. (Av. Wk., 12/28/64, 31)
Director General of the International Air Transport Association, Sir William Hildred, said in the association's annual air traffic forecast, "Thanks to increased efficiencies and economies, the balance between revenues and expenditures should continue to improve. In fact, it just seems possible that the industry will succeed in making a positive net profit in 1965 for the first time in its life." (UPI, NYT, 12/29/64,50)
Among persons listed by Aviation Week and Space Technology for significant contributions to the progress of aerospace in the U-S. during 1964 were: Harold B. Finger and Milton Klein, manager and deputy respectively of the joint AEC-NASA Nuclear Space Propulsion Office for "pushing the Rover program through four successful tests of a nuclear rocket reactor using liquid hydrogen and demonstrating the technical feasibility of nuclear propulsion for manned interplanetary flights of the future-" Harris "Bud" Schurmeier, Ranger program director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his technical team for "their tremendous technical success with the Ranger VII that produced the first detailed photographs of the lunar surface." Paul F. Bikle, Director of NASA Edwards Flight Research Center, and pilots Milton O. Thompson and Jack Mackay of NASA and Maj. Robert Rushworth and Capt. Joe Engle of USAF for "their continued operation of the North American X-15 research aircraft into a wide variety of unexplored areas both in performance and equipment testing." John Mengel of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for "direction of the global NASA tracking and data acquisition network Which produced an average of 50 mi- of taped data per day from payloads in space." Col. Harold W. Robbins, USAF Space Systems Div., for "technical direction and support of the large solid rocket program that culminated this year in the successful demonstrations of 156-in.-dia. motors and the initiation of a 260-in-dia. program" (Av. Wk., 12/28/64, 9)
December 28-30: Dr. John H. Wolfe of NASA Ames Research Center suggested the probable source of Van Allen belt radiation at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Seattle. Dr. Wolfe said the Van Allen radiation belts probably, had their source in the comet-like tail of the magnetosphere extending from the dark side of earth away from the sun. Spiraling protons and alpha particles emitted by the sun were shielded from solar wind in this area. Affected only by the geomagnetic field, they were picked up by the magnetic lines of force and conveyed to the Van Allen belts. New data collected by particle energy spectrometers and other instruments aboard EXPLORER XXI IMP-B (Interplanetary Monitoring Platform) and OGO I (Orbiting Geophysical Observatory) led to this conclusion. Data collected from as far into space as 96,000 mi. revealed that interaction of the solar wind and the geomagnetic field around the sunlit side of earth created a boundary region 21/2 earth diameters thick at a distance of five earth diameters from the point on earth closest to the sun. This expanded to six diameters thick 90° around earth. Hydromagnetic effects in this boundary deflected solar radiation around earth and prevented it from penetrating directly to the relatively low altitudes of the Van Allen belts except during the more energetic solar storms. Satellite data also indicated that the comet-like tail of earth extended directly along the line from the sun through earth, rather than being slightly deflected as had been believed. Wolfe said the tail seemed less tapered and more nearly cylindrical than had been expected, and extended at least as far as the orbit of the moon. (ARC Release 65-2; AP, Detroit News, 1/8/65; M&R, 1/18/65, 28)
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