Dec 2 1980
From The Space Library
The NSTL in Mississippi completed a fourth and final cycle of certification tests on the Shuttle main engine. Certification required successful completion of four test cycles each of 13 tests and more than 5,000 seconds of operation,. using two different engine assemblies. A cluster of three main engines and two solid-fuel rockets would thrust the Shuttle into orbit. (NASA Release 80-182; MSFC Release 80-158)
MSFC said that the Michoud facility near New Orleans had begun assembling the lightweight external-propellant tank for the Space Shuttle. Built by Martin Marietta Aerospace, the modified tank would weigh 6,000 pounds less than its predecessor, increasing Shuttle payload capacity by about that amount. Recent structural tests showed that reducing thickness of skin panels would not affect tank integrity; changing materials of some components would also take advantage of recent research.
The external tank (actually two tanks connected by a collar-like intertank) would contain liquid-hydrogen and liquid-oxygen propellants for the three Shuttle main engines and would be the only major element not recovered for reuse. First of the lightweight tanks should be ready for delivery in the summer of 1982 for the fifth Shuttle launch. (MSFC Release 80-155)
The New York Times reported that the first attempt at long-distance solarpowered flight lasted 22 minutes when Solar Challenger, Dr. Paul MacCready's lightweight high-strength plastic-and-balsa craft driven by a 2.75-hp motor, took off December 3 about 1:00 p.m. from an airport north of Tucson, Ariz., headed for Phoenix, and came down six miles away. Former teacher Janice Brown, 32, who piloted Challenger, said that it was "fantastic" and she would "try again tomorrow." Powered like other record-setting MacCready vehicles by solar cells covering its wing and tail, Challenger apparently experienced failure of its motor (no larger than a champagne bottle, and of lighter weight, the New York Times noted) and Brown set the 1351-pound plane down on the desert, where nearby farmers and several American Indians came to look at it. (NY Times, Dec 4/80, A-18)
GSFC said that a team of its scientists and technicians had pioneered a stereo-imaging technique for studying hurricanes, using photographs of the top of the same hurricane taken by two spacecraft, Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites Goes East and Goes West, hovering over the equator at 75°W and 135W. The team combined time-lapse cloudcover photos of Hurricane Frederic over the Gulf of Mexico September 12 in a stereo display showing changes in the storm as seen from space and allowing estimates of its intensity. (NASA Release 80-181)
ESA said that it was training at Toulouse and Marseilles the U.S. and European Spacelab mission and payload specialists to give them a better idea of the scientific objectives and let them operate 2 of the 11 French experiments. The first Spacelab payload would be launched in June 1983.
PICPAB (phenomena induced by charged-particle beams), a plasma-physics experiment under test at Toulouse, would study results of energetic-particle emission along Earth's magnetic-field lines, such as neutralization and instability, for use in remote measurement of electric fields and creation of artificial auroras. At Marseilles the crew would become familiar with the very wide-field camera for general UV survey of moss: of the celestial sphere and study of galactic and extragalactic sources. (ESA. Info 30)
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