Sep 23 1991
From The Space Library
NASA announced that its Goddard Space Flight Center/Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Virginia, had selected H and H Consolidated, Inc. of Hampton, Virginia, for an operation/maintenance and alteration con-tract of facilities and equipment services. (NASA Release C91-jj)
Business Week reported that NASA planned to use three giant, 70-foot-tall computer-controlled robots to inspect, clean, dry, and line new and refurbished solid rockets for space flights. Vadeko International, Inc., a Canadian engineering company, was to design and build the robotic system, to be in service in 1993. (Bus Wk, Sep 23/91)
NASA announced the renaming of the Gamma Ray Observatory, deployed April 7, 1991, by Space Shuttle Atlantis, in honor of American physicist Arthur Holly Compton. (NASA Release 91-151)
Gerald Fishman of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center at a press conference spoke of the findings of the Gamma Ray Observatory to date. He said that an instrument called the Burst and Transient Source Experiment had detected 117 gamma ray bursts since launching. These bursts were randomly scattered, not from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy as previously thought. (AP, Sep 23/91; P Inq, Sep 24/91; USA Today, Sep 24/91; W Post, Sep 24/91; NY Times, Sep 24/91; W Times, Sep 24/91)
The Government Accounting Office issued a study criticizing NASA's system of testing spacecraft before launching. It called the system poorly organized with testing practices varying from one center to another because NASA lacked uniform policies. The study dealt with the Hubble Space Telescope and the weather satellites, as well as Space Shuttles. (AP, Sep 23/91; UPI, Sep 23/91; LA Times, Sep 23/91; NY Times, Sep 24/91; USA Today, Sep 24/91; WSJ, Sep 24/91; W Times, Sep 24/91)
The Chicago Tribune featured Elmhurst College professor Frank Mittermeyer who has been growing tomatoes from some 1,000 seeds that orbited Earth for six years and were retrieved by Space Shuttle Challenger in 1990. Mittermeyer noticed the second generation of space tomatoes were not as robust as the first. (C Trin, Sep 23/91)
NASA announced that the first United States-Soviet space art team exchange would occur on September 28 when the U.S. team arrived in Moscow. The purpose was to have each team produce paintings of the other country's space activities. (NASA Release 91-152)
NASA announced that scientists and engineers at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, successfully tested the mini-rover Rocky III in the Avawatz Mountains south of Death Valley. The mini-rover, weighing 52 pounds, was designed to be used on Mars. (NASA Release 91-153; Bus Wk, Sep 9/91)
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