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Subject: SPACE Digest V9 #364

SPACE Digest                                      Volume 9 : Issue 364

Today's Topics:
         ASCII versions of Cold Fusion papers
      Mir problem identified - difficulty with the power system
         Jobs on Mars Observer Camera project
           Re: Soviet Mars probes - ZOND 2.
               Re: Questions and Henry
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 13 Apr 89 10:08:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ted Anderson <[e-mail]>
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Subject: ASCII versions of Cold Fusion papers

I have ascii version of both the Fleischmann&Pons (UofU) paper and the
Jones&Palmer (BYU) paper available.  If you would like to see one or both mailed
to you let me know.  Send a note to [e-mail] specifying
which you'd like and I'll get them out ASAP.

While this is not entirely space related I thought there would be enough
interest for warrant a message.
        Ted Anderson

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 13 Apr 89 14:12:14 EDT
From: Glenn Chapman <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail], [e-mail],
        [e-mail]
Subject: Mir problem identified - difficulty with the power system

     More details have come out about the problem on board the USSR's
Mir/Kvant space station.  Bill Lane at Boston University has reported
to me that on Apr. 12th the Soviet evening TV news had
Valeri Ryumin (head of cosmonaut training, and former cosmonaut with 326
days in orbit on 3 flights) detailing the main difficulty, a problem in
the station power system.  The electricity coming out the solar cells
shows the correct levels but at the batteries there has been a continuous
decline in the power available to run the station and charge the storage
unites.  This is not a life threatening problem, and they wish the crew to
make more measurements.  However, it was stated that they needed to bring
the crew down to talk to them after April 27th.  This is strange: one
would think that it would be better to let the crew stay up and work on
the problem, shipping up the repair materials they require by Progress
tanker (crews have repaired the previous Salyut 7 station even without
training for the work that they did).
   General Vladimir Dzhanibekov (5 time cosmonaut) has been put in
charge of a committee to study the situation and report what repairs can
be done.  There is a certain irony here; in June '85 Dzhanibekov and Viktor
Savinykh flew up in Soyuz T-13 to try and save the crippled Salyut 7 space
station.  Again this was a power problem, with them needing to repair
the batteries of the station and directly connect them to the solar cells.
One can see the committee's report being present and then him being
told to go up there and save the station again.
   There have been some reports, especially a wire service article originating
from the Los Angles Times, that the station was being closed down for
economic reasons.  It is true that the next expansion module has been
delayed to the fall, so that would say the crew would be just holding
the fort until that time.  On the other hand, Pay Load Systems Inc. was
just about to do their crystal growth experiments on Mir.  If you are trying
to establish yourself in the business you would not close down the station
just when the first paying customer comes up.  My contacts there said they
new this delay was coming for the past week, but had no details. Also the
Financial Times (London) reported on Apr. 3 that the British have just bought
a Mir visit for 1991 at the cost of 15 million pounds ($25 million).  The
contract was to be signed during General Secretary Gorbachev's visit to
the UK (though the BBC short wave announced it was signed on Apr. 12th).
A company called Britain in Space was created to run this project and the
money as donated from private sources.  Note, this is a private not a
government contract.  Considering that the Austrians and French already
have contracts for such missions to Mir, while a Japanese journalist
contract is about to be signed, the argument that the Soviet program is being
scaled back to reduce costs seems rather strange.  At the same time as the
LA article appeared the report on Radio Moscow was stating how space
activities had returned 1.5 billion roubles (about $400 million) to their
economy so far this year in the commercial area alone.
    All of this suggests that there are difficulties on Mir and the Soviets
have decided to remove the crew.  This is most sensible if the power problems
means the crew could be in danger, while not allowing worthwhile activities
to occur.  Combined with the delay in the expansion modules, which certainly
will not be launched if there are difficulties on the station,
the crew is coming down, leaving the station unmanned for the next few
months.  It does not seem that suddenly the Russians have come to the
conclusion that manned activities do not pay, as these western press
report would have us believe.  Mean while the US House Appropriations
Committee is voting on the transfer of $600 million in 1988 year funds
from the NASA space station budget to the Veterans Administration.
There certainly are those that want to convince the public that
manned activities should be abandoned.

                                            Glenn Chapman
                                            MIT Lincoln Lab

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 11 Apr 89 10:04:01 MST
From: [e-mail] (Mike Caplinger)
Subject: Jobs on Mars Observer Camera project

------ message #1 -----
In 1992, the United States will launch the Mars Observer spacecraft to
conduct an extensive survey of Mars from low polar orbit. One of its
instruments, the Mars Observer Camera (MOC), will be the most advanced
imaging experiment ever flown on a planetary mission.  The MOC
consists of three optical systems -- a narrow-angle camera that will
take pictures at about 1.5 meter/pixel resolution (8 to 80 times
better than the best Viking photos) and dual wide-angle cameras that
will map the entire planet in two colors at lower resolution.  The
instrument is controlled by a set of custom gate arrays and an
NS32C016 microprocessor, with 12 megabytes of RAM for image storage.
The MOC is being designed and built by a small team of faculty, staff,
and contractors associated with Arizona State University and Caltech.

We are presently staffing the MOC software development group at ASU.
Our primary activity over the next three years is to build the MOC
Ground Data System (GDS), which will almost completely automate
planning, operations, and data management for the MOC.  The GDS will
allow scientists to target observations interactively, using an image
database containing mapping products and all the pictures taken by
Viking.  It will then automatically schedule these observations and
translate them into MOC commands for transmission to the spacecraft,
as well as reconstruct and archive returned images and monitor
instrument telemetry.  During the mission, MOC operations will be
entirely and autonomously controlled at ASU using 56Kb network
connections to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

In addition, starting in 1990 we will be responsible for maintenance
of the MOC flight software, and after launch, for the development of
science analysis tools for use by the MOC science team.

We are looking for a software engineer to work on all of these
activities.  The ideal candidate will be a generalist -- in the past
year, our work has spanned the spectrum from research in computer
vision, graphics, and AI expert systems to Unix device drivers and
low-level assembly language programming.  A strong academic background
and at least five years' experience in computer science are required;
an advanced degree is preferred.  Salary will be negotiable and
competitive with industry standards, but we want someone who is
primarily interested in this job for its own sake.  Opportunities to
participate in research both in computer science and planetary science
are available.  The position will be as a staff member at Arizona
State University and includes an excellent benefits package.

MOC facilities presently consist of a network of Sun workstations,
Macintosh personal computers, and a Pixar II image computer.  More
hardware will be acquired as the project continues.  We also have
access to the ASU Cray-1 supercomputer.

If you're interested and feel you're qualified, please mail a resume
with three references to

Dr. Michael Caplinger
Mars Observer Camera Project
Department of Geology
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-1404

Please mail a paper copy.  Do *not* reply to the sender of this
message, especially if you're reading it in netnews.  If you want to
email a copy in addition to the paper copy, please note the addresses
below.

If you have any questions, call me at [phone] or send email to
[e-mail] (ARPA) or ucbvax!sun!sunburn!miranda!mc (UUCP).

------ message #2 -----
Mars Observer Camera Update (and plug for job offering)

It's been a couple of years since we put out a message about the Mars
Observer Camera (MOC), so we thought people might like to know its
status.  Also, we're plugging a job opportunity, listed in net.jobs
and various other places.  [the above notice -Ed]

Memory refresh: Mars Observer is the next U.S. mission to Mars.
Originally scheduled for a 1990 launch, it was postponed for two years
owing to launch vehicle problems (it was planned to be a Shuttle
launch).  Launch is now scheduled for September 16, 1992 aboard a
Titan III.  Arrival is in August 1993, operations begin November 1993
and continue for a full martian year (687 days).  Despite some serious
setbacks last year, MO still carries the most sophisticated remote
sensing package yet flown in space: a high sensitivity gamma ray
spectrometer to determine elemental composition, a thermal emission
spectrometer to determine mineral and rock composition, a
pressure-modulated infrared radiometer to map the pressure and
temperature field of the atmosphere, a laser altimeter capable of
measuring height differences of about 2 m over a 150 m footprint, a
magnetometer and electron reflectometer to search for and map martian
magnetic anomalies, a ultrastable radio oscillator to allow precision
spacecraft tracking to map gravity anomalies, and the camera.

The MOC is the most advanced camera yet flown to another planet.  It
consists of a 3.5 m focal length, f/10 telescope which, combined with
a custom CCD line array, provides better than 1.5 m per pixel from 360
km altitude.  Acquiring data at 40 Mbits/sec, the narrow angle camera
data passes through an ASIC for realtime image compression, and then
into a 12 Mbyte RAM buffer for storage and later playback to the
spacecraft data system.  Other gate arrays serve as communications
controllers.  All of this is under the control of a 32-bit
microprocessor (the NS32C016).  The wide angle cameras (11.5 mm focal
length, f/6.5 - one each optimized for blue and red wavelengths) have
horizon-to-horizon views of Mars, which allow daily global images to
be accumulated much like NOAA and DMSP weather satellites cover the
Earth.

The MOC engineering model is presently under construction.
Perkin-Elmer and Composite Optics, Inc. are assembling the optics and
graphite-epoxy structure.  The rad-hard gate arrays are being
manufactured at UTMC in Colorado Springs, and the custom CCDs at the
Ford Aeronutronics foundry in Newport Beach.  This will all be put
together at Caltech.  First electrons should flow through the thing in
late May, and full-up testing of the EM should begin by mid-summer.

Because of its electronics, the MOC has also been at the center of an
international agreement for joint Soviet/French/American operations at
Mars in 1995.  The Soviet Mars 94 mission will carry 2 to 4
French-made balloons with cameras.  An agreement has been reached to
fly a French radio receiver on Mars Observer to acquire data from
these balloons and to feed them into the MOC for processing and
downlink to Earth.  This will allow the return of almost an order of
magnitude more data than originally planned by the French and Soviets,
mostly pictures with resolutions approaching a few millimeters.

All of the experiment planning, operations, and analysis will be
performed remote from the traditional site of such activities, the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.  Each experiment, including the camera, will be
run autonomously by the Principal Investigator at his home
institution.  Developing the hardware/software system to do this the
sole responsibility of the PI.  We're now into the second year of our
four-year effort to put together an automated system that will allow two
to three people to do what has, in the past, required 20 to 40 people.
Take a look at our job ad if you're interested in more info on this
part of our work.

Well, that's the short summary.  Anyone interested in more
information can contact:

Mike Malin (MOC Principal Investigator)
Dept. of Geology, Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ 85287-1404
[e-mail] (ARPA)
ucbvax!sun!sunburn!miranda!malin (UUCP)
asuipf::malin (SPAN)

or

Mike Caplinger (MOC Ground Data System Design Scientist)
Dept. of Geology, Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ 85287-1404
[e-mail] (ARPA)
ucbvax!sun!sunburn!miranda!mc (UUCP)
asuipf::mc (SPAN)

If you missed the job ad, look in Space Digest on ARPA or misc.jobs
or sci.space on Usenet, or mail to Mike Caplinger, addresses above.

------------------------------

Date: 11 Apr 89 15:18:10 GMT
From: cfa!cfa250![e-mail]  (Jonathan McDowell)
Subject: Re: Soviet Mars probes - ZOND 2.

From article <[e-mail]>, by [e-mail] (Matthew DeLuca):
> I always thought that the Zond series was a potential lunar capsule, to
> compete with Apollo, and when Apollo 11 landed, the series was allowed to
> 'die'.  What's the real story?

Zond is just Russian for 'probe'. There were really 2 series of spacecraft
using the Zond name, completely unrelated. Zond 1-3 were probes of the
Venera-2 class, used for testing Mars and Venus probes in solar orbit.
They were built on the same spacecraft bus as Venera-2 to Venera-8 and Mars-1.
Zond 4-8 were modified Soyuz spacecraft assigned to the lunar program, and
(I think) called Zond just to confuse the issue.

Jonathan McDowell

------------------------------

Date: 11 Apr 89 14:27:52 GMT
From: thorin!zeta![e-mail]  (Jonathan Leech)
Subject: Re: Questions and Henry

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:
>More seriously, I am quite excited about both Magellan and Galileo.  They
>are basically the last big things out of the Apollo-era pipeline, with
>very little left in the pipe behind them... but they're nifty all the same.

    Disagree. After VOIR was cancelled in 81-82, Magellan was what they
managed to replace it with. This can hardly be called Apollo-era.
--
    Jon Leech ([e-mail])    __@/
    ``One never knows... Deacon now wants to conduct population
      explosion tests *underground*.'' - Molester Mole

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V9 #364
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