March 1982:space activities report

NEW UK SATELLITE

The UK has agreed to contribute a free-flying sub-satellite (UKS) to the Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer Explorers (AMPTE) project which is due for a Shuttle launch in 1984. The two other satellites are being built by the Americans and Germans (described in last month’s Space Report).

During lauhch, UKS will form the structural link between the German and US spacecraft, but thereafter will keep station within 100 km of the German spacecraft - the Ion Release Module (IRM) - in order to study a series of barium and lithium ion releases to be made from IRM. There will be a total of seven such releases into the solar wind and radiation and plasma environment of the Earth over the nine months of the mission.

The American satellite - the Charge Composition Explorer (CCE) - will orbit through the radiation zones closer to the Earth in order to detect the arrival of the "tracer" ions. The three satellites will also join forces to make extensive measurements with unprecendented resolution of the Earth’s natural plasma envirnoment.

One release of barium ions, planned near Christmas 1984, will create what will appear from the ground for some 30 minutes as an artificial comet, interacting with the solar wind in much the same way as a real comet. The releases will be visible mainly from North and South America where a suitable chain of ground observing stations and spotter planes can be made available.

The release of the tracer gases from the IRM will trace the flow of matter and energy from the solar wind into and through the Earth’s magnetosphere, while simultaneously examining the complex sequence of plasma processes triggered by such releases. The experimenters expect to observe a rich spectrum of plasma waves, electron and ion acceleration and the for¬ mation of a magnetic cavity among many other phenomena.

Although weighing only 69 kg, UKS is nevertheless highly complex. The satellite will be controlled via the 12 m dish antenna at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory to remain within some 100 km of the IRM using an on-board radar and propulsion system. The instruments will measure magnetic fields, detect positive ions in the energy range 5 eV-20 keV, detect electrons in the energy range 40 eV-25 keV, investigate wave/particle interactions including positive-ion and electron modulations, and detect plasma waves by making measurements of the electric and magnetic components at frequencies from-0.1-64 Hz.

FAGET RETIRES

Maxime A. Faget, father of the Mercury spacecraft, retired from NASA shortly after the STS-2 mission to be a consultant and to carry out private investigations of several energy conservation schemes.

Faget, Director of Engineering and Development at the Johnson Space Center since 1961, said that he planned to remain closely associated with the space programme as a consultant.

Faget joined the Langley Research Center in 1946 as a research scientist into pilotless aircraft. He was later named head of performance aerodynamics, a post he held until 1958.

His creative drive and engineering perception resulted in his selection as one of the original group of 35 assigned as a nucleus of the Johnson Space Center (then the Space Task Group), serving three years as Chief of the Flight Systems Division.

PROPULSION MODULE

The Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) will be used in conjunction with the Shuttle to take payloads into geostationary orbits (GEO) - but other stages may appear.

A TRW study - described by Dr. Brodsky in his paper “An Economical And Flexible Alternative Orbital Transfer Vehicle” presented at the 32nd IAF Congress - proposes an all-liquid low-thrust propulsion module.

The study took the case of a growth version of the TDRS communications satellite which the present all-solid IUS would be unable to handle.

Propellants for the module - nitrogen tetroxide and monomethyl hydrazine - would be stored in six tanks arranged within a framework, using a pressure system to feed two 300 lbf engines of the type used on the Viking Mars missions. This initial version could take about 5200 lb into GEO but masses of up to 10,0001b could be handled by increasing the tanks’ lengths.