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Aviation History
1974
1974 - 1725.PDF
FLIGHT International, 24 October 1974 581 Ariane to continue France on October 16 pledged to its Esro partners to con tinue work on Ariane, the European launch vehicle whose future has been under review in the French parliament to gether with other programmes in a wide-ranging effort to cut down on national spending. The Secretary of State for information, M Andre Rossi, said after the weekly cabinet meeting that the French Government considered that the project was important for the independence of Europe in the field of satellite communications. It is understood that France wants to off-load some of its national space commitments on to its Esro partners, although this is not a condition for continued support of Ariane. These facilities may include, for example, the French space centre at Guyana, the space simulator at Toulouse and a number of tracking stations around the world. However, it does appear that France will insist on some sort of agreement or commitment from Europe to use Ariane when it becomes available. This could be a difficult negotiation, particularly if at any time Nasa was to offer comparatively cheap launch vehicles to Europe. Flight understands that France also favours a much firmer administrative and technical structure for European space affairs. This, it thinks, could be achieved by winding up the European Space Conference and arranging that its place be taken effectively by occasional ministerial meet ings of the Esro council (the ESC has been essentially a forutn of ministers, while the Esro council is composed of deputies). Western Europe is expected to launch 38 satellites in the next decade and while not all of these are for space appli cations, the majority will be dedicated to communica tions or utilisation purposes. The French Government's argument for retaining an independent launch capability was underlined on the previous day by Mr Roy Gibson, Esro's Acting Director General, in a lecture at the World Aerospace Conference in San Francisco. He said that in a period of four years Esro had "changed from being almost exclusively concerned with scientific satellites to an organisation with around 70 per cent interest in applica tions programmes." INTELSAT V DECISION DEFERRED Intelsat's Board of Management, which met in Washington earlier this month, has decided to defer its decision on the next-generation Intelsat V cornmunioaltions-satellite system for a further nine months. Instead it asked Comsat, its management services contractor, to negotiate the purchase of a further three Intelsat IVAs. Intelsat already has three Intelsat IVAs on order from Hughes, and these were originally expected to provide capacity over the Atlantic until mid-1978. However, it is now thought that they will saturate before then, so the second batch of three will be needed to maintain services until that date. In addition it has asked Comsat to negotiate for a fur ther three Intelsat IVAs under an option to purchase ex tending to the end of 1976. Some or all of these would be launched as required in order to maintain services until mid-1979. What will happen therefore is that the existing major-path satellite now in orbit will gradually fill up to such an extent that it effectively becomes a primary satel lite. There will thus be two primary satellites over the Atlantic, and Intelsat will have to devise a distribution system in order to share their combined capacity between groups of users. UK5 LAUNCHED On October 15 Britain's fifth scientific spacecraft, the UK5 X-ray astronomy satellite, was lofted into a near-perfect 513km X557km, 2-9° orbit by a Nasa Scout vehicle. The launch took place from the San Marco converted oil-rig platform situated in the Ngwana Bay rocket range three miles off the coast of Kenya. Once in orbit it was renamed Ariel 5. Within 24hr of the launch the controllers at the Science Research Council's Appleton Laboratory at Slough expressed themselves satisfied with the working of the satellite's "housekeeping" systems, and switched on the first of the six experiments, the Imperial College high- energy (20keV-plus) detector to study selected X-ray sources. Meanwhile, the remaining experiments were under going low-voltage testing prior to highntension switch-on. Once all six experiments are working, some time this week, the first celestial object to come under their scrutiny will be Cygnus X-2, a suspected black hole. DELTA TRIPLE LAUNCH Notwithstanding the vehicle's chequered recent career, a Delta rocket is to be entrusted with the simultaneous launch of three satellites at the end of October. The payload will comprise the fourth Itos operational weather satellite, Spain's first satellite, Intasat, and Amsat Oscar B, a non-commercial communications satellite designed by the US amateur radio fraternity. ItosG, to be redesignated NOAA-4 (NOAA is the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) once in orbit, is scheduled for a 1,450km circular polar orbit and is equipped with radiometers to provide visible and infra-red images of cloud cover, snow and ice, and the surface of the sea, and to measure the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere. It is the latest addition to an operational system which for the last eight years has supplied a steady stream of useful data to weather fore casters in the United States and elsewhere. The two pick-a-back satellites will enter orbits with the same parameters as that of Itos-G, but will be dispensed from the Delta second stage at intervals to ensure orbital separation. Intasat has been designed and developed by the Spanish Institute of Aerospace Technology in collabora tion with Hawker Siddeley Dynamics and carries equipment to measure the total electron content of the atmosphere. The programme is being administered by Spain's Comision National de Investigation del Espacio and data will be transmitted to some 30 or 40 investigators around the world. Tracking and telemetry for the 20kg spacecraft will be provided by Nasa and a final report of results will be made to the US National Space Science Data Centre at the Goddard Space Flight Centre, which has responsibility for the management of the project in the United States. Oscar (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio)-B has been developed by the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (Amsat), a non-profitmaking scientific corporation based in Washington DC. Amsat has members throughout the world and subsystems for Oscar-B have been provided by Australia, Canada and West Germany, as well as the US. There have been two previous Oscar launches and the last one, Oscar-6, is still operating two years after enter ing service. It has been used by 2,400 radio hams in 87 countries and all 50 US states. The purpose of the project is to educate American high-school students in the prin ciples of space science by means of practical demonstra tions of satellite communications between volunteer radio amateurs via these satellites. Oscar-B will be commanded from ground stations at Washington DC, Los Angeles, Newington in Connecticut, Ottawa and Melbourne. It is equipped with two communications transponders operating on downlink frequencies of 29-5MHz and 145 95MHz res pectively, and two radio beacon experiments operating on 435 1MHz and 2,304 1MHz. The 29-5kg satellite has an expected useful lifetime of three years.
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