Sojourner Online

SOJOURNER

The Newsletter of

the Seattle Chapter

The National Space Society

NSS Seattle

»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»» June 1998 «««««««««««««««««««««

The National Space Society is an international membership group

dedicated to furthering the exploration and development of space. The Seattle

chapter mission is to facilitate Space Activism and all pro-Space activities; and to provide

a gathering place for space enthusiasts to meet, exchange information and ideas.

President:   Vince Creisler vincelc@hotmail.com
Vice President: Chris Vancil    CLVANCIL@aol.com
Secretary:      Randy Rumley    rjrumley@juno.com
Treasurer:   David Stuart        xsxs80a@prodigy.com
Editor:    Christopher Erickson aster@wolfenet.com

----------Board of Directors---------

Kelly Caviezel Gary Harrison Christopher Erickson

Susan Harrison Toni Rusi

------------Advisors------------

Terrill Burlison

Chapter meetings are held at 7:00 PM on the second Saturday of each month, at the

Museum of Flight; parking is available in the lot North of the museum. To receive

information regarding upcoming events please send your name and addresses

to: Randy Rumley; 12008 S.E. 223rd Drive Kent, WA 98031

XVIII

so·journ(sò jûrn), to stay for a time in a place; live temporarily.

Message from the President

By the time of this meeting, the final Shuttle-Mir mission will be completed. Hopefully, weather permitted those receiving the Mir sighting table,

e-mailed to the NSS Seattle list, to witness an over-flight heralding the end of an era.

If all goes well, the era of the International Space Station should begin toward the end of this year, per the latest revised assembly schedule. We can then look forward to watching the ISS as it's being assembled overhead, over the next few years.

As Space advocates, we'll also need to keep an eye on developments in Washington, DC--to respond in case opposition to ISS starts building.

Vince Creisler

President, NSS Seattle

A few new URLs:

The Astrobiology Web:

http://www2.Astrobiology.Com/astro/

(astrobio@reston.com)

The Virtual Space Museum:

http://www.ccas.ru/~chernov/vsm/halls.htm

ISS assembly sequence:

http://station.nasa.gov/core.html

Upcoming meeting

June 13, 1998

Our speaker this time will be Dr. John Slough. He will be giving a talk called: "Fusion Reactor for Deep Space Propulsion" Dr. Slough is building a fusion rocket in Redmond. He is a senior scientist at the Redmond Plasma Physics Lab funded by the DOE and the University of Washington.

Meeting Summary

May 9, 1998

May's speaker was Roger Meyers of Primex. His discussion of different forms of electrically powered thrusters was quite informative.

He went into the uses for these thrusters and their current and upcoming missions/spacecraft. They are used on satellite systems for orbit raising, Drag makeup de-orbit, and Attitude control systems in LEO, MEO, and GEO (Low earth orbit, Medium earth orbit, and Geosynchronous earth orbit). They are also used on interplanetary missions such as Lunar Prospector for propulsion and orientation.

The main reason companies and governments are looking at using these thrusters is cost. With lower fuel requirements, costs can be considerably lower than with chemical rockets. The only drawback is that it takes more time to do a major orbit change, but that is secondary to cost.

The types of thrusters he went over were: Arc-Jets which use Hydrazine (N2H4) as propellant, Hall Thrusters which use Xenon as the propellant, and the PPT (pulsed plasma thruster) which uses a bar of Teflon as the propellant.

As with the NORWESCON meeting, this meeting was recorded by John Schlick. It will be broadcast Sunday, June 14 from 5:00pm to 7:00pm on channel 29. Please tune in and take a look. We are interested in feedback. I hope everybody got to see the last one. It was fun to see myself sputtering away on TV. We will probably do an update version of the space station discussion at some future meeting. In the mean time, I will re-learn how to speak.

Randy J. Rumley

Secretary, NSS Seattle

Notes on THE FACE!

For those who aren't familiar with the "face on Mars" here is a short history of the Cydonia images. During the mid-70's JPL/NASA/USA sent two Viking spacecraft to Mars. Each spacecraft had two components, a Lander and an Orbiter. Each Orbiter mapped the surface of Mars. During a couple of the mapping passes, an Orbiter took some images of an area called Cydonia. In this region there is a mile wide and several hundred foot tall hill that has the look of a "face". At the resolution of the cameras on the Orbiters it was hard to tell whether the "face" was really artificial or natural. Well Mars Global Surveyor went into orbit around Mars last year. MGS has a much better imaging System, MOC (Mars Orbiter Camera) onboard and so people hoped to resolve the nature of this pile of rock with a few images. As we all should have guessed, this has not been the case.

If you look only at the "face" there are some very regular features and what appears to be right angles. Some people see eyes and other facial features in the image. I doubt the alien origins of the face myself but then I have trouble with all the "alien artifacts" lying around this region of Mars, not just the "face" but the "ruins of the city" ( a city with pyramids, ruined walls, and monuments).

Let me first say I'm not a geologist, and make no claims that what I observe has to be the truth. The region in which Cydonia is situated seems a lot like the "channeled scablands" of eastern Washington. A lot of water has passed over this area, leaving buttes and sculpted islands in the wake. The Face looks to me like one of these buttes that has had wind, water, meteorites and possibly ice weathering it over centuries.

Others, with more expertise, see these buttes and mesa forming as the results of volcanism, comparing them to the islands around Iceland. "Basically, I was addressing the really flat areas with an occasional hill popping out of nowhere. Consider, for example the island formed off Iceland in the 1960's. It's an island right now, but the ocean is rapidly wearing it away. It will soon probably look a lot like it's neighboring islands – which are essentially vertical slabs sticking out of the water. Now, if the ocean level were to drop drastically, the islands would be essentially buttes sticking out above the Ridgeline defined by the Mid-Atlantic ridge. As the water level drops, beaches would form along the water line depositing relatively flat areas along the ridges. " said Charles Buckley. For more information on this theory, see (buckley@Colorado.EDU) in the Usenet Newsgroups sci.space.policy (04/08/1998).

In the Astronews section of the July issue of Astronomy, "...Mars Global Surveyor image...shows the "Face on Mars" to be a hill scarred by shoots and rubble piles indicative of landslides." I don't think the Mars Global Surveyor images or the press will convince the true believers, it did slow them down till they regrouped, but most reasonable folks see nature sculpting the "Face". This whole stink over the first image taken by Viking has been like a really big Rorschach test and not aliens! But to really be sure we need to go to Cydonia. Once there we can do some good old field geology, and. just maybe...who knows for sure... some field archeology.

To see more images check the Malin Space Science Systems' Url( the people who built the MOC and have been processing it images ): http://www.msss.com/mars/global_surveyor/camera/images/index.html

The pictures are from Malin Space Science Systems/NASA

By Chris L. Vancil

Vice President

NSS Seattle

News of interest from

the Mars Society

Mars Society Special Bulletin Number 2

Reprint and pass on as desired.

For further information about the Mars Society and their founding meeting, visit their website at:

http://www.marssociety.org or

http://nw.net/mars for our No-Frames site.

Mars Society Calls for Mobilization to Save Mars 2001 Mission Rover

As a result of the Clinton Administration's pulling of $60 million in committed funds to support the Mars 2001 mission, NASA has canceled plans to fly the "Athena" robotic rover to Mars in that year.

Because of greatly expanded science requirements, an extra $60 million was actually needed to fly the two-spacecraft 2001 Mars mission as planned. The administration's decision to subtract $60 million, instead of adding it, was a devastating blow.

This decision represents a massive setback to the US Mars exploration program. The Athena rover is a highly instrumented mobile rover capable of traveling tens of kilometers across the Martian surface; imaging, examining the soil chemistry and mineralogy of Mars, drilling beneath the surface, and searching for evidence of life. It is a major scale-up in both size, technology, and overall capability compared to the highly successful Sojourner rover that flew to Mars during the Pathfinder mission of July 1997. It is meant as the precursor to a still more capable rover that would fly to Mars in 2003 to gather samples for the Mars Sample Return mission scheduled for 2005. Canceling the Athena rover or delaying its flight till 2003 (the next mission opportunity) will push back the schedule of the entire Mars exploration program by at least two years.

The decision to cancel Athena represents a violation of President Clinton's promise made in August 1996 to "put the full intellectual and technological might of the United States behind the search for life on Mars." It is also a violation of the administration's space policy document released in October 1996 which promised a permanent robotic presence on Mars by the year 2000. It's also just plain nuts. The current JPL robotic Mars exploration program is one of the few organizations within NASA to actually implement NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's call for "faster, better, cheaper" mission design. Recent missions implemented by this group have been carried out at about 1/5th the cost of missions of comparable complexity (such as Cassini, Galileo, Mars Observer, and EOS) implemented elsewhere or earlier by NASA. To stop this extremely productive program dead in its tracks to save $120 million (spread over three years, out of a 13,000-million/year NASA budget) shows an incredible misjudgment of priorities.

There are two other components of the Mars 2001 mission that are still scheduled to fly: An orbiter equipped with a gamma ray spectrometer to prospect the chemical composition of the planet, and a lander equipped with experiments demonstrating the ability to make rocket propellant on Mars out of the local atmosphere and for measuring radiation levels on the Martian surface. Both of these components are also vital to the future of Mars exploration. Saving the rover by canceling one of these is not an option. Instead, the $60 million in funds pulled from the program must be restored, and the extra $60 million required added to provide the 2001 mission the full $400 million budget it needs to be done right.

The Mars Society calls upon every individual and organization concerned with space exploration to rally to turn this disastrous decision around. You can help by sending e-mail expressing your concern to all of the people listed at the end of this section.

And while you're at it, you might also let them know that while restoring the robotic Mars exploration program to fiscal health is absolutely necessary, it's not enough. The American space program overall needs a mission worthy of a $13 billion per year space agency, and that can only be the human exploration of Mars. The Clinton-Gore administration may not be interested in continuing America's pioneering tradition in space, but they owe it to the American people not to deny the person they choose as their next president that option. Starting now, NASA's Human Exploration and Development of Space (HEDS) division needs to be funded to prepare human Mars exploration at minimally the same level of funding (about $150 million/year) as the robotic Mars program. This will allow the HEDS group to conduct the critical Phase A planning and key technology demonstration effort that will enable NASA to say to the next president-elect on the day following the Nov. 2000 election: "Here is our plan. These are our detailed designs, time-lines and cost estimates. We can have people on Mars by 2008, before the end of your second term. The choice is yours."

Save the robotic Mars exploration program.

Start the human Mars exploration program.

Please send these gentlemen a message!

President Bill Clinton -

president@whitehouse.gov

Vice President Al Gore -

vice.president@whitehouse.gov

NASA Administrator Dan Goldin -

dgoldin@mail.hq.nasa.gov

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) -

senatorlott@lott.senate.gov

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) -

georgia6@mail.house.gov

Senator Christopher Bond, Chairman VA, HUD, and Independent Agencies Subcommittee -

kit_bond@bond.senate.gov

Representative Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Chairman VA, HUD, and Independent Agencies Subcommittee - c/o

dave.lesstrang@mail.house.gov

Contributed by:

Chris Vancil

Vice-President, NSS Seattle

HGS-1 En-Route to 2nd Lunar Encounter

HUGHES GLOBAL SERVICES, INC.

Communications and Customer Relations

P.O. Box 92919 (S10/S323)

Los Angeles, CA 90009

Media Relations (310) 364-6363

Investor Relations (310) 662-9688

www.hughesglobal.com

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

EL SEGUNDO, Calif., June 5, 1998 -- The HGS-1 satellite is on its way toward a second rendezvous with the moon on Saturday, following thruster firings early this week.

HGS-1 is the satellite that was launched last Christmas Day and, because of a malfunctioning launch vehicle, was left in an unusable, highly elliptical orbit. Hughes Global Services, Inc., (HGS) has obtained title to the fully functional satellite, an HS 601HP model built by Hughes Space and Communications Company. Hughes made spaceflight history last month by sending HGS-1 around the moon, using lunar gravity to improve the resulting orbit once the satellite returned to Earth. It was the first commercial mission to the moon. Hughes is sending the satellite around the moon again this month to further improve the orbit. No further lunar trips are planned.

At 7:40 p.m. PDT Monday, small thrusters on the satellite were fired for half an hour, giving the satellite a small change in velocity. The gentle boost went perfectly, and was sufficient to send HGS-1 on a 15-day loop around Earth and out to the moon.

HGS-1 is expected to pass near the moon again around 9:30 a.m. PDT Saturday. Lunar gravity will give the satellite's trajectory, or flight path, another twist and send it back to Earth. On June 11, Hughes controllers will reposition the satellite for its final orbit. A retro burn June 14 will slow it down and allow it to enter near-Earth orbit. A series of maneuvers over the next few days will settle it into circular geosynchronous orbit, 22,300

miles (36,000 km) above the equator. HGS-1's final position will be determined after Hughes finds customers for its services.

When HGS obtained title to the satellite, it agreed to try to find revenue-producing uses for the satellite and to share profits with the insurers. A consortium of 27 insurers had owned the satellite after the original mission was declared a total loss. HGS' primary business is packaging satellite communications services for governmental entities, although it is actively seeking commercial interest in the entire satellite as well.

"With the orbital improvements obtained by this second lunar rendezvous, I expect a great deal of interest in this brand-new, high-power satellite," said Mark Schwene, HGS vice president. "I'm looking forward to talking to potential customers for the satellite."

HGS-1 made its first swing around the moon May 13. It was a first-of-its-kind mission, and the flyby went almost exactly as predicted by Hughes orbital analysts. On May 16, as the satellite approached Earth, Hughes mission controllers slowed it down by firing the on-board rocket motor, which exerts a thrust of 110 pounds. This put the satellite into a looping 15-day orbit around Earth with an apogee -- the farthest distance from the Earth -- of about 303,000 miles (488,000 km). The moon is about 250,000 miles away (402,000 km).

The maneuver Monday used the satellite's small thrusters, which exert only 5 pounds of force, to nudge the satellite into position for its second lunar flyby. On Saturday the spacecraft will pass the moon's surface from a distance of nearly 21,300 miles (34,300 km), which is about 5.5 times farther than the initial lunar encounter. An additional firing of the rocket motor is planned for the morning of June 11, to further position the satellite for its final orbit. Rocket motor burns on June 14, 16 and 17 are planned to settle HGS-1 into geosynchronous orbit over the Pacific Ocean, where it will be "parked" until customers and a final orbital location are determined.

Hughes Global Services is a subsidiary of Hughes Space and Communications Company (HSC), the world's leading manufacturer of geostationary commercial communications satellites. Scientists and engineers from both HGS and HSC are taking part in the mission. Both companies are units of Hughes Electronics Corporation. PanAmSat Corporation, of which Hughes Electronics is the majority owner, has been providing critical command and tracking support for the mission through its ground station in Fillmore, Calif.

The earnings of Hughes Electronics are used to calculate the earnings per share attributable to GMH (NYSE symbol) common stock.

Contributed by:

Chris L. Vancil

Vice President, NSS Seattle

Some Facts on the

International Space Station

Total Pressurized Volume: ISS (alpha) à 760 m3, (Freedom à 878 m3, Salyut 1, 4, 6, 7 à 85 to 100 m3, Mir à 300 m3, Skylab à 361 m3, MOL à 11.3 m3)

Crew size: 4, unchanged

User Science Racks: 39 >ISS, 46 >Freedom

Average User Power: 31kW >ISS, 34.2kW >Freedom

Completion date: 2003

Robotic Arms for Construction/Maintenance: 2, ESA, Canada

Transportation: Shuttle for most modules, truss work, and main solar panels

Proton, Soyuz Rockets for most Russian components, crew transfer, and 'progress'

Arian 5 for ESA launches of the Automated Transfer Vehicle

Other vehicles as necessary

Crew Return Vehicles, initially, Modified Soyuz, later X-38 type lifting body with parasail

What we won't have: Use of ISS as platform for going on to the moon due to orbit change.

Who is participating, and what do they bring

U.S.A.: Node 1, US Laboratory module, Habitation module, truss work, Main solar panels and radiators. Main transport (shuttle)

Russia: FGB or FCB - Functional Cargo block/Space Station propulsion module, SM - Service Module, Soyuz crew transfer vehicle, progress re-supply vehicle, various other modules including secondary solar panels for Russian portion of ISS.

Canada: Canadarm mark II for construction and maintenance of the modules other than Russian, control panels for Canadarm, occasional crew member and/or research project.

Japan (NASDA): JEM – Japanese Experiment module, including exposed facility for materials experiments & astronomical observation, pressurized laboratory module for life science experiments, logistics module for control of Japan-arm (for experiments), life support panels (air/water).

Europe (ESA): COF - Columbus Orbital Facility (unattached), DMS-R Data management systems and European Robotic Arm (ERA) for assembly/ maintenance of Russian portion of ISS, ATV – Automated Transfer Vehicle cargo carrier, COF General purpose materials, fluid science, life science, and technological development laboratory, also has parts in Node 1, Node 2, and JEM.

ESA made up of: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

ESA web site quote: "The COF constitutes European Real Estate on the Station."

Compiled by:

Randy J. Rumley

Secretary, NSS Seattle

What's on the web (the ever growing list of URLs):

Space Place:http://www.thespaceplace.com/

Space Race:http://www.nasm.edu/GALLERIES/GAL114/SpaceRace/

Space Case:http://spot.colorado.edu/~marscase/

Mars Society:http://www.nw.net/mars/

Plans to rcover AsiaSat3:http://www.hughespace.com/hsc_pressreleases/98_04_29_lunar.html

U.S. Congress on the Internet:http://thomas.loc.gov/