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Aviation History
1977
1977 - 0147.PDF
FLIGHT International, ISlanuary 1977 137 Vikings back in business THE two Viking spacecraft are now back in full operation surveying the surface of Mars and analysing soil samples after the period of hiberna tion caused when the Sun cut off Earth-Mars communications last November. Signals commanding the craft to resume photographic and infra-red surveys were transmitted on December 16 and 17. Equipment was switched on more slowly than had been hoped for because a tight budget has not allowed for round-the-clock working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Pasadena Viking mission-control centre. This will have little or no effect on the programme, however, because the US Office of Management and Budget has agreed to a Nasa request for another 18 months With both the orbiters and the landers. It had previously been agreed that while the orbiters could go on for a further 18 months after the November shut down, the two landers would be restricted to a 12-month extension. Thus the four craft are to be kept in operation until May 1978, enabling them to observe a full Martian year (687 Earth days). A variety of experiments will be conducted during the extended mis sion. They include more photography, and temperature and water-vapour measurements of the surface and polar regions, some of them with twice the resolution of previous observations. More soil samples will be analysed in the continuing search for life, and the seismometers will maintain a watch on disturbances underground. Weather observations are to go on, and there will he -a close watch for the beginnings of dust storms, which can obscure vast areas of the planet. Efforts will be made to take more photographs of the pair of Martian moons, Deimos and Phobos. ESA approves Earthnet THE Council of the European space agency at its meeting in Paris on December 16 and 17 approved a new programme called Earthnet, in which ESA will be responsible for co ordinating European activities in the processing and distribution of Earth- resources data from US satellites. Europeans so far have made rela tively little use of these satellites, and the purpose of Earthnet is to provide these countries with an opportunity to see how best to use data from the new generation of satellites to be launched between now and 1980. These include Landsat, Seasat (to be launched in 1978) Nimbus-G (late 1978) and the Heat Capacity Mapping Mission (HCMM) scheduled for 1978. Information received from the satellites by European terminals, not ably at Fucino and in Sweden, will be processed at ESA's data centre at Frascati into the formats required by the various member countries. There is yet insufficient interest in Earth- resources activities among European countries to justify a special pro gramme. But the Earthnet informa tion will be able to show the charac teristics required in such spacecraft if a latter commitment arises. Earth- net is a relatively modest programme with a budget of about 3 million accounting units (about £1-8 million). Nasa disposes of surplus Apollo gear WHILE SOME of the Saturn-Apollo equipment and facilities used in the Apollo, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz pro grammes are being modified for use in future space activities, Nasa is disposing of those items which have no foreseeable application. The move reflects the US shift in emphasis from the exploration of space to its exploi tation "for the benefit of mankind." Since April 1975 Nasa has, at the request of Congress, retained its store of remaining Apollo equipment as an insurance against possible political or technical problems with the Shuttle. Since then the reserve Skylab Work shop and Apollo-Soyuz docking module have been transferred to the Smith sonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. Twenty-two H-l engines from Saturn IB stages have been passed over for installation in Thor-Delta launchers. Nasa still has two complete Saturn V vehicles, the third stages from two Saturn IBs, one complete Apollo command and service module, and one partially assembled unit. Much of this equipment will also go to the Smith sonian, but some will be refurbished or modified for the Shuttle or other programmes. The first group of non-Soviet astro nauts has arrived at the Cosmonauts Training Centre at Zvezdny Gorodok, near Moscow, to begin training. They come from Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany. While America's Vikings gear up for the second phase of their investigations of Mars, there are still plenty of pictures and data from last year's activities to keep the scientists busy. This photo graph, taken by the Viking I orbiter from a height of 1,360 miles, reveals puzzling ridges which, though having some of the characteristics of congealed volcanic channels, do not have the structure of typical lava runs. Much of the terrain may have been modified by the repeated deposition and stripping of surface material by winds
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