Sep 10 1999

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Space News for this day. (6MB PDF)

NASA's Inspector General Roberta L. Gross published findings and recommendations on behalf of NASA's Office of Inspector General, regarding Vice President Albert A. Gore Jr.'s proposed Triana satellite project, named for Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor on Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage who had first spotted North America. The Triana project would call on NASA to provide "continuous, satellite-generated images of the Earth for posting on the Internet." Gross suggested that it was "ill-advised for the financially strapped [A]gency to fund a new system to collect pictures of Earth when many images" were already widely available. Gross said the Triana project would cost four times as much as the Vice President's US$50 million estimate, noting that NASA had already spent US$41 million on the project, even though Congress had not yet endorsed it. She criticized NASA for "pressing forward with the project without fully assessing the scientific value of photographing the Earth." NASA had scheduled the satellite for launch aboard a Space Shuttle in December 2000.

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