Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This is going smooth as silk." Thus, with only days to go, NASA Spokesman Jim Kukowski ebulliently described the final launch preparations for next week's flight of the Challenger space shuttle. Lift-off for the eighth mission of NASA'S Space Transportation System, known as STS-8, is scheduled for Aug. 30 at 2:15 a.m. at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, just two months after Challenger's historic flight carrying the first American woman into space. That is the shortest turnaround time yet between shuttle flights. This time there will be three more firsts...
...some cases, they test their electronic beacons, known as ELTs (emergency locator transmitters), to see if they are working properly, and then forget to turn them off. These devices, required by law, automatically start broadcasting on standard international frequencies after a sharp impact like a crash. When spurious NASA signals deluge the air waves, rescuers are overwhelmed. They must track down every alarm. Says Mosemann: "Suppose your local fire station received your call and the fire chief has to ask a policeman to drive by your house and verify the problem. Ridiculous...
...Force, joined by NASA, the Coast Guard and the FAA held a conference early this month to discuss ways of reducing the epidemic of SOS calls. Still, even irritated officials concede that on rare occasions the false alarms can lead to pay dirt. Earlier this year, rescuers followed satellite-relayed signals to a farm in the Southeast. The officials found a helicopter hidden in a haystack and loaded with marijuana...
...years (150 trillion miles) away, has a solar system may be the most important finding so far made by IRAS, a joint effort of the U.S., Britain and The Netherlands that was launched last January. When Astronomers H.H. Aumann of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the project for NASA, and Fred Gillett of Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona aimed the instrument at Vega, they detected an unexpectedly strong flood of infrared radiation, or heat. (IRAS is the first orbital telescope that operates in the infrared frequency range, taking the temperature of the various components of the universe...
Officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which made the announcement Wednesday, have said that the particles recently detected around the star Vega--one of the sky's brightest--could range in size anywhere from buckshot pellets to asteroids or large planets...