Oct 12 1976
From The Space Library
NASA announced that LeRC, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, and the Natl. Weather Service had successfully completed in Alaska a 3-wk demonstration of an all-weather ice-information system developed in response to a Congressional request to see if the Great Lakes could be kept open for shipping all year. Cargoes reshipped because their barges had been iced in or turned back by weather had incurred additional transportation costs estimated at between $30 and $50 million in 1975 alone. The demonstration-performed along the western and northern coasts of Alaska, a region having serious shipping problems caused by thick ice 60% of the time-used a Coast Guard plane equipped with NASA's side-looking airborne radar to obtain daily microwave imagery similar to black-and-white photography, that revealed the type and distribution of ice in any kind of weather regardless of dense cloudcover. The data on coastal shipping were relayed through a Goes satellite by way of Wallops Island to LeRC; after processing, the images were sent back through Canada's CTS satellite to Alaska for the Navy's ice interpreters to use in making navigation charts for vessels moving in offshore ice. The system had been used in the Arctic to aid the Coast Guard icebreaker Glacier in operating through ice in zero-visibility conditions. Use of the system had helped to keep the Great Lakes open for shipping for two full seasons for the first time in history, at an estimated saving of hundreds of millions of dollars each year; the 1976-77 shipping would be the third and final year of demonstration. (NASA Release 76-165)
NASA announced appointment of Or. James R. Lawson, currently serving as special assistant to the director of ERDA's Office of University Affairs, as NASA Director of University Affairs, effective 8 November. Dr. Lawson, president of Fisk Univ. from 1967 to 1975, received a bachelor's degree in physics from Fisk and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Univ. of Mich. In 1957 he became professor and chairman of the physics department at Fisk, doing research on infrared spectroscopy. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, he had received the Rosenwald Fellowship and the Afro-American Natl. Fellowship Award. In his new position, Dr. Lawson would be principal adviser on NASA's relations with universities, including special university programs having agency-wide scope and interest, (NASA anno. 12 Oct 76)
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