Author Topic: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!  (Read 155185 times)

Offline Ares67

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #40 on: 10/16/2012 08:40 pm »
July 21: RTG USE PROTESTED
Protestors Wendy Loomas and Willa Elam returned to Kennedy Space Center along with Maria Telesca to protest the use of plutonium aboard the Galileo probe which is scheduled to be aboard an Oct. 12 mission. Don Williams is Commander of the astronaut crew which will fly that mission; he said: "I'm convinced - the crew is convinced - that it's absolutely safe to fIy these RTG power sources on the Galileo spacecraft.” Pilot Michael McCulley said: "I have a wife, a bunch of kids, I've got aunts and uncles, 32 first cousins, and I've invited every one of them to the launch. I'm as comfortable with that as can be."

Nuclear power protestors are concerned that a Challenger-like disaster will rain radioactive fallout here: "Dying of cancer is my main concern because I live close to here," said Wendy Loomas (Rockledge), who protested at Spaceport USA. She wore a surgical mask and carried a sign which read "No Plutonium on Shuttle." She said, "I'm just not going to trust them flying this on the Shuttle." Williams acknowledged the existence of a risk, but said, "This is something that this country, this world, needs to do." (Florida Today, July 22, 1989)

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #41 on: 10/16/2012 08:43 pm »

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #42 on: 10/16/2012 08:44 pm »

Offline Ares67

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #43 on: 10/16/2012 08:47 pm »

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #44 on: 10/16/2012 08:51 pm »
July 22: ATLANTIS UPDATE
Workers will spend the next couple of days preparing the orbiter’s hydraulic system for flight. They will also check out the nose wheel steering system and the brake's anti-skid system. Meanwhile, technicians continue to install heat shields around the shuttle' s three main engines. (Florida Today, July 23, 1989)


July 29: ATLANTIS UPDATE
Workers are installing the left Orbital Maneuvering System pod, which helps steer the orbiter in space. This week technicians will continue testing the waste containment system and send helium throughout the main engines to test for leaks. (Florida Today, July 30, 1989)

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #45 on: 10/16/2012 08:52 pm »
August 5: ATLANTIS UPDATE
Kennedy Space Center employees have cleaned the main propulsion system in Atlantis in preparation for a helium leak test this weekend. Schedulers are planning to move the Orbiter into the Vehicle Assembly Building on August 23 where it will be combined with its External Tank and Solid Rocket Boosters. Its next flight will come October 12 and will send the Galileo probe to Jupiter. (Florida Today, Aug. 6, 1989)


August 9: ASTRONAUTS HELP WITH GALILEO TEST
Shuttle Mission Specialists Ellen Baker and Shannon Lucid took part in a test of the Galileo probe and its upper stage booster today. "The astronauts were here to do a sharp edge inspection of the spacecraft to make sure there's nothing that could snag their spacesuits in the event of an emergency spacewalk," said Kennedy Space Center spokesman George Diller. Baker and Lucid also took part in a two-day test designed to assure that all electrical and mechanical connections between the spacecraft and booster work properly, Diller said. The other members of the Galileo mission crew are Commander Don Williams, Pilot Michael McCulley and Mission Specialist Franklin Chang-Diaz. The entire crew will take part in a practice countdown at the space center on September 5. (Florida Today, Aug. 10, 1989)


August 13: ATLANTIS UPDATE
Today, Kennedy Space Center workers plan to close the Atlantis's payload bay doors and test its landing gear. They also will replace several valves in the main propulsion system; continue to fill 23 tile cavities; and test the Orbiter's auxiliary power units. Rollover to the VAB is now scheduled for no earlier than August 20. Once in the VAB, Atlantis will be bolted to its Solid Rocket Boosters and external fuel tank. It will remain about eight days before being rolled out to launch pad 39B. The next mission for Atlantis is to send the Galileo probe to Jupiter; it’s scheduled to liftoff on October 12. (Florida Today, Aug. 13, 1989 - edited)

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #46 on: 10/16/2012 08:59 pm »
These are the voyages…

“It’s been a very special decade in human history.”

Bradford Smith, head of the imaging team, summing up the Voyager mission


We’ll temporarily leave launch preparations for STS-34 and Galileo now and look beyond Jupiter to the dark outer reaches of our solar system, where Voyager 2 was closing in on Neptune in late August 1989…

First a preview article published in Countdown, September 1989, looking back at the history of Voyager and explaining what to expect during and after the Neptune fly-by:

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #47 on: 10/16/2012 09:05 pm »
It may not help you in your next Trivial Pursuit game, but here are some facts about Voyager churned out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's public relations people:

- The Voyager mission has cost each U.S. resident 20 cents a year since the project began in 1972. (That totals $865 million.)
- The two Voyager spacecraft have sent back 5 trillion bits of scientific data, enough to fill 6,000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
- The power it takes to operate a digital wristwatch is 20 billion times greater than the power of the Voyager radio signals reaching Earth.
- Each Voyager spacecraft consists of 65,000 major pieces of equipment, equal to 2,000 color TV sets.
- The space probes have electronics that can operate on 400 watts of power, about a fourth used in a U.S. home.
- The tape recorders aboard the Voyager probes are durable enough to play a two-hour videocassette once a day for 22 years.
- The Voyager spacecraft maneuvers 30 times slower than a clock’s hour hand to allow photos at light levels 900 times fainter than those at Earth.
- Each Voyager spacecraft has cameras that can read a newspaper headline at 0.62 miles.
- An unprotected human riding on Voyager 1 would have received a radiation dose 1,000 times the lethal level while passing Jupiter.
- The Voyager project has consumed 11,000 work years, one-third what it took to build the great pyramid at Giza.
- Each Voyager spacecraft has a slight roll that engineers cannot control. The roll is 15 times slower than the motion of a clock's hour hand.
- When the Voyager spacecraft swept past Jupiter, they got an energy boost and Jupiter suffered an energy loss, enough to slow its motion by 1 foot in the next trillion years.
- Voyager gets 30,000 miles to the gallon.
- Pele, the largest volcano on Jupiter's moon Io, spews sulfur to a height 30 times that of Mount Everest and the fallout covers an area the size of France.
- The Voyager spacecraft will leave the solar system in 20,000 years, at which time they will have traveled half the distance to the nearest star.

(USA Today and Deseret News, Aug. 25, 1989 - edited)

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #48 on: 10/16/2012 09:10 pm »

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #49 on: 10/16/2012 09:18 pm »
The Voyager Days of August – A Close Encounter With Neptune

“I like Neptune. I want to go there someday. For some reason, I never did like Uranus…”

Dixon P. Otto, Publisher and Editor, Countdown


(Based on “Voyager at Neptune” article in Countdown, November 1989, with additional material – taken from USA Today, Deseret News, The Orlando Sentinel,  and Florida Today – edited)


“The last picture show,” the Voyager team tagged the encounter with Neptune. Each day for ten days of August, the Voyager team would pull out the latest photos and data like a sightseer returned from the 24-hour Photomat. Each August morning a representative group of Voyager scientists would appear before the press in the von Karman Auditorium at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They would be led by the tall, hawk-like figure of Edward Stone, the chief Voyager scientist at JPL. He had been a part of Voyager when the project began in 1972, and seen it through launch in 1977, through planetary encounters with Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus – and now to its last stop before leaving the solar system.

Bedford Smith, head of the Voyager imaging team and an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona would follow, and in a relaxed Arizona manner, display the latest Voyager vacation photos of Neptune. He had been dazzling the press with photographic wonders since Voyager began revealing the mysteries of Jupiter in 1979. Smith would be followed by Laurence Soderblom, another old Voyager hand. Soderblom, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, was the team’s “moon man” and would display the latest images of the moons of Neptune, especially the mysterious Triton. Other scientists would follow, such as Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist with the University of Arizona at Tucson, the “ring woman” who specialized in the rapidly-changing view of the ring system of Neptune. Scientists with less “glamorous” areas, such as fields and particles, also would report.

All would be practicing a new form of science, one developed with Voyager, called “instant science.” Each day would bring a flood of new information and scientists would scratch hurried notes and scratch their heads, trying to develop instant explanations for revelations that always seemed more incredible than previously theorized. Being scientists, they were cautious, carefully refraining from throwing to the press anything but the best theories worked out among themselves. But it was science in a hurry – and it was changing every day during the Voyager days of August.


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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #50 on: 10/16/2012 09:19 pm »

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #51 on: 10/16/2012 09:20 pm »
Friday, August 18, 1989: VOYAGER 2 PICKS UP RADIO WAVES
Electronic ears aboard the Voyager 2 space probe, less than a week from its historic flyby of Neptune, have picked up intense, naturally occurring radio emissions from the bluish planet, indicating a magnetic field that could create spectacular auroras, scientists said Friday. The radio emissions are produced by electrically charged atomic particles as they spiral around magnetic field lines and smash into the cloudy planet's frigid atmosphere."The radio emissions are very intense, very impulsive, and occur in a limited range of frequencies," said James Warwick, principal investigator of Voyager 2's planetary radio astronomy experiment.

Voyager 2, launched 12 years ago Sunday on an unprecedented grand tour of the outer solar system, will sail 3,000 miles over Neptune's north pole at 10 p.m. MDT Thursday, whipping by the strange moon Triton five hours later before heading out of the solar system altogether. Voyager 2 already has discovered four new moons, pushing Neptune's total to six, and two partial ring arcs, broad swaths of debris possibly left over from the collision of two moons in the distant past. (Deseret News, Aug. 19, 1989)

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #52 on: 10/16/2012 09:23 pm »
Sunday, August 20, 1989: DARK SPOTS AND SCOOTERS
The blue atmosphere of Neptune held focus as Voyager approached, with encounter four days away. The partial rings sighted by the spacecraft on August 11 had disappeared from view. A 3,000-mile-long ring arc had been spotted just outside the orbit of the moon 1989 N4, one of three moons discovered by Voyager, which orbits 23,300 miles from Neptune’s cloud tops. The second arc, about 6,000 miles long, had been seen trailing the moon 1989 N3, which orbits 17,000 miles from the cloud tops.

The planet was displaying an active atmosphere with storms driven by 400 mph winds. Bright, high-level clouds, nicknamed “scooters,” skittered across the face of the planet. A cyclonic storm, the Great Dark Spot, had been observed for months by Voyager. Another smaller, cyclonic storm of the “dark spot” variety had been spotted, along with three bright spots. The scooters, made of frozen methane, trail the whirlwind storms and whiz around the planet once every 16 hours. The Great Dark Spot, located at 21 degrees south latitude, varies in shape during its 18-hour rotational passage. Voyager, making inbound “movies” of the rotating face of Neptune, watched it pulsate in shape and spin off a tail of tiny storms in its wake.

“It’s surprising to see all this weather activity,” said Andrew Ingersoll, an atmospheric scientist at California Institute of Technology and a member of the Voyager imaging team. Neptune receives only a thousandth of the energy from the Sun as the earth does, yet somehow the atmosphere is energized. “Any way you slice it up, it’s very little energy to drive the kind of weather we are seeing,” Ingersoll said. Perhaps more than the core, trapped since the planet formed, may be bubbling up through the atmosphere, some theories say. This process would be unlike Uranus, which presents a bland face because (the theory goes) the heat remains trapped inside by insulating layers of compressed atmosphere.

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #53 on: 10/16/2012 09:28 pm »

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #54 on: 10/16/2012 09:35 pm »
VOYAGER SENDING FINAL “POST CARDS”
The aging Voyager 2 space probe will fly past Neptune this week, sending video "post cards" home before its cameras go dark forever. Launched a dozen years ago, on Aug. 20, 1977, Voyager 2 was a minor player in the U.S. space race and in American consciousness at the time. he big news from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration then was the successful test of the Space Shuttle Enterprise, geared to ferry people and supplies between Earth and orbiting space laboratories in the 1980s. As the 1980s draw to a close, the horizons of the U.S. space program have been narrowed by financial constraints; the shuttles were grounded for more than two years after the 1986 Challenger disaster and a U.S. Space Station is far from reality. But Voyager 2, an unmanned vehicle equipped with television cameras, radio receivers and computers and powered by plutonium-based electric generators, has just kept going. Its 4.4-billion-mile trek through the solar system will bring it to within 3,000 miles of Neptune at about 9:00 p.m. PDT next Thursday. Closest approach to the moon Triton will occur about five hours later.

In October, Voyager 2's cameras will be turned off to conserve fuel and it will move toward interstellar space, reaching the edge of the solar system in the next five to 10 years. Voyager 2 and its twin Voyager 1, launched September 5, 1977, followed similar paths past Jupiter and Saturn, sending back pictures for scientists to interpret. Voyager cameras discovered volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io, learned more about the largest planet's atmosphere and found that Saturn's rings were more numerous and complex than previously believed. The encounter with Neptune, the farthest planet from the sun at this stage of its elongated orbit, began in June for astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which runs NASA's Voyager program.

Already scientists have found four new moons, partial rings never apparent before and a large dark spot believed to be a fierce Neptunian storm. Scientists said Friday that Voyager has detected intense radio emissions from Neptune, indicating the planet has a magnetic field. The discovery increases chances Voyager will detect a wide range of phenomena related to a magnetic field. (Deseret News, Aug. 20, 1989 - edited)


Monday, August 21, 1989: A DYNAMIC PLANET AND AN INTRIGUING MOON
The “ghost arc,” the partial ring that had been observed on August 11, has reappeared in Voyager’s photographs. The arc had disappeared since first being observed. Voyager 2 has detected radio emissions from Neptune with a 16-hour period, which can be explained most simply as the rotation period of Neptune’s interior, Dr. James Warwick said. “In a large, liquid planet with strong winds, the interior rotates significantly differently from surface features,” Warwick said, so the interior rotation period is the best indication of the length of its day. The 16-hour period is one hour, 52 minutes less than scientists had expected for Neptune.

Voyager 2 photographs of the planet show a dynamic, constantly changing atmosphere with large and small “spots” reminiscent of the atmosphere of Jupiter. The largest, the “Great Dark Spot,” reminds mission scientists of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. “It is about the same proportion to the planet’s size; it is the same latitude, and it may be slightly redder than Neptune,” said Bradford Smith. “That doesn’t mean it is red, but that it’s not as blue as the rest of the planet.”

“Neptune is an extremely dynamic planet, with less than 50 percent of Jupiter’s energy,” Smith said. Images of the planet show bright clouds in the atmosphere that Smith said “are reminiscent of cirrus clouds on Earth.” They appear to be at extremely high altitudes, so high that the methane in Neptune’s atmosphere doesn’t cause them to appear blue. The planet’s blue color is caused by absorption of longer wavelengths or light by methane. Some bright clouds disappear over time, which Smith said indicates that they may be rising and falling rather than disappearing.

Images of Neptune’s largest satellite, Triton, appear to show surface features that rotate at about the same rate as Triton’s expected 5.88-day orbital period. Triton is smaller than had been estimated from Earth-based observations. “Triton has been shrinking as we approached,” Smith quipped, “until we feared that by the time we arrived it might be gone. It will surely turn out to be between 1,380 and 1,400 kilometers radius.” The moon is showing a pinkish cast, mottled with dark spots near the equator. “Triton is an especially intriguing object. It’s in the wrong orbit. It’s going backwards around Neptune,” Smith said, backwards meaning opposite the direction the planet rotates, making it the only large moon in the solar system to do so. “Something truly catastrophic must have happened sometime in its past.”

The moon, which could be a trapped comet, could be experiencing “snow” of frozen nitrogen, although it is too cold for the seas of liquid nitrogen once believed possible. “It’s very difficult right now to say anything about what’s going on on Triton,” Smith said. Dr. Edward C. Stone, Voyager project scientist, described calculations that scientists have performed that indicate the big satellite could have been liquid for as much as one billion years of its history. That could have happened, Stone said, if Triton had been captured by Neptune as it passed close to the planet.

Earlier this morning Voyager 2 performed the final trajectory-correction maneuver of its 12-year, one-day flight. Project manager Norm Haynes said the maneuver was designed to trim up Voyager 2’s trajectory for the time when the spacecraft disappears behind Triton, as seen from both Earth and the Sun. “We had no safety concerns,” Haynes explained. “Before the TCM, Voyager would have performed the Earth occultation, but not the Sun occultation. Now we’ll do both.” He said the maneuver, which altered Voyager 2’s speed by about 1/2 meter per second, changed its direction more than its speed.


VOYAGER IS BLASTING TOWARD CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE LAST KIND
After a 12-year, 4.4 billion-mile space odyssey, Voyager 2 converges this week on mysterious Neptune, the most distant and last unexplored planet, due for a visit by a spacecraft from Earth. "It's almost like being on a ship of discovery like Marco Polo, Magellan and Columbus," says Jurrie van der Woude, a spokesman at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "For most of us, this is the last picture show, the last foreign shores we visit in the solar system."The robot probe was programmed to fire its thrusters to set a final course for Thursday's close encounter with Neptune and Friday's flight past Triton, Neptune's largest moon. Confirmation of the trajectory change wasn't due until four hours and six minutes later - the time it takes for Voyager's signals to reach Earth, even at the 186,000-mile-per-second speed of light. On its approach to the solar system's fourth-largest planet, the picture-snapping space probe already has discovered four moons in addition to Triton and Nereid, which had been discovered from Earth, as well as two partial rings of debris orbiting Neptune.

Voyager also discovered Neptune has a magnetic field; hurricane-like storms dubbed "scooters" with 400-mph winds; 2,700-mile-wide bands vaguely like Earth's jet streams; and an 8,100-by-4,100-mile Great Dark Spot, probably a huge storm like Jupiter's Great Red Spot. NASA listed Voyager's position Monday as 2.743 billion miles from Earth and 3.211 million miles from Neptune. With no one planning a mission to Pluto, Neptune is the last unexplored planet that will be visited by a spacecraft from Earth. Neptune, usually the eighth planet from the sun, currently is the ninth and most distant. Pluto follows an elongated elliptical orbit and is closer now. At 8:59 p.m. PDT Thursday, Voyager makes its closest approach to Neptune by skirting 3,000 miles above the planet's cloud tops - much closer than its encounters with Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981 and Uranus in 1986.

Sunday was the 12th anniversary of the spacecraft's launch. The Neptune encounter is the climax of the $865 million, twin-spacecraft Voyager mission, which also saw Voyager 1 explore Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980. Sending Voyager to Neptune was like "sinking a 2,260-mile putt, assuming the golfer can make a few illegal fine adjustments while the ball is rolling across this incredibly long green," according to "The Voyager Neptune Travel Guide," written by mission planner Charles Kohlhase.

About 170 researchers from around the world are at the laboratory for the Neptune encounter. Up to 8,000 photographs from Voyager's two television cameras and discoveries by 10 other science experiments are expected to pour in so quickly that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will conduct daily news briefings through Aug. 29.

Cable News Network planned brief live reports at 3, 6, 8 and 10 p.m. MDT, starting Monday. And public television will cover the fly-by live Thursday, with KBYU (Channel 11) scheduled to join the PBS coverage at midnight and KUED (Channel 7) set to start at 1 a.m. A special telephone line, (900) 590-1234, will provide frequently updated, recorded status reports on Voyager. The line will carry live audio from the news conferences. The cost is 45 cents for the first minute and 35 cents for each additional minute. Similar programs are available by calling (818) 354-4227, 354-0409, or 354-7292, at JPL. Normal long-distance charges apply. (Deseret News, Aug. 21, 1989 – edited)
« Last Edit: 10/16/2012 09:55 pm by Ares67 »

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #55 on: 10/16/2012 09:39 pm »

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #56 on: 10/16/2012 09:44 pm »
Tuesday, August 22, 1989: A COMPLETE RING
The first complete ring around Neptune has been discovered in the images sent to Earth by Voyager 2, Professor Smith said. The existence of a ring that completely encircles Neptune surprised scientists, because repeated observations from Earth have failed to see ring material on opposite sides of the planet at the same distance. Those observations led scientists to speculate that parts of rings, or “ring arcs,” were responsible for the Earth-based findings. The new ring is so diffuse that observers on Earth would be unable to see it, Smith explained. The second “arc” observed by Voyager may turn out to be a complete ring, too.

The new ring appeared in a series of images sent to Earth early this morning, and scientists are still trying to process the data to extract more information. “We can’t tell much about the ring yet,” Smith said. “When we get behind Neptune and can look back toward the Sun, we’ll have the benefit of forward scattering of sunlight by the individual ring particles,” he explained. “We can’t tell how large or small the particles in the ring are, or how wide it is, now, because it is so faint.” The new ring lies just outside the orbit of the newly discovered satellite provisionally called 1989 N3, about 33,000 miles from the center of Neptune.

Neptune itself, meanwhile, continues to put on a meteorological show for scientists at the Jet Propulsion laboratory. Stone said the spacecraft’s ultra-violet spectrometer will search for auroral activity (like the northern and southern lights of Earth) near Neptune’s South Pole. Streaks of bright, white clouds continue to race across Neptune’s bluish atmosphere. Methane is responsible for Neptune’s bluish hue, and it hides clouds at lower altitudes, while those higher in the atmosphere are bright.

Smith showed photographs of Neptune’s largest satellite, Triton, which showed a mottled surface in a variety of pinkish hues. “We won’t be able to understand Triton’s surface until we get close enough to resolve geological details,” he said.

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
« Reply #57 on: 10/16/2012 09:46 pm »
NEPTUNE'S “LOST ARC” IS A FULL RING
Searching for the "lost arc" of Neptune, NASA's Voyager 2 probe rediscovered a dim, hard-to-find patch of icy debris circling the planet, proving what had been thought to be a partial "ring arc" is instead an unbroken ring. Voyager 2's small, 1970s-era computer was programmed to search for more evidence of ring material Wednesday as the spacecraft raced toward a low-altitude flyby of Neptune Thursday that will cap a 12-year, once-in-a-lifetime grand tour of the outer solar system. So far in the encounter, the hardy robot probe has discovered four new moons, pushing Neptune's total to six; a gigantic storm system in the planet's methane atmosphere similar to Jupiter's Great Red Spot; and evidence that the moon Triton has a transparent atmosphere and a surface that may be covered by methane snow or frost.

And on Tuesday, the spacecraft beamed back pictures showing a complete ring around Neptune, along with a broken, or partial ring. More gossamer swaths of debris may be found after the flyby, when the distant sun lights them from behind. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and now Neptune all feature complete rings. Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said Neptune's rings could represent either end of an evolutionary process. "I think it could be completely evolutionary," she said. "One thought that's been going through my mind is Neptune, for example, might be the terminus of this evolutionary sequence, although we don't know which terminus it is. Perhaps it's a ring system that hasn't formed yet, or perhaps it's the net result of having a full-fledged ring system like Saturn's or Uranus's, which has been worn away. That's a question that's hotly contested now in the ring community."

If all goes well, Voyager 2 will sail a scant 3,000 miles above the clouds of Neptune Thursday about 8:55 p.m. PDT, before plunging southward behind the planet and onto a flyby of the moon Triton five hours after the encounter with Neptune. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced the discovery of two such partial rings Aug. 11 but one of them, circling the planet at an altitude of about 17,000 miles, has not been photographed since. Overnight Monday, Voyager 2, in a determined search for the "lost arc," beamed back 55 pictures of the space around Neptune. "More than one ring (arc) could be seen even in the raw images," astronomer Bradford Smith said at a news conference. "It seemed reasonable that this was indeed the lost arc that our imaging team raiders were looking for. The answer to that is yes and no. "It is indeed in exactly the right place. The no is, it's not an arc, it goes all the way around! So it is Neptune's first complete ring." Smith said the other, partial ring may be complete as well, but that is not yet clear.

Dramatic color photographs were released by NASA that showed huge streamers of white cirrus clouds swirling around the storm system - large enough to swallow the entire planet Earth - and a mottled pinkish surface on Triton, which may be covered with a frosty layer of frozen natural gas - methane. Triton is one of six known moons, four of which were discovered by Voyager 2. Smith said two of those, temporarily dubbed 1989 N3 and 1989 N4, are associated with the two known ring structures. Moon 1989 N4 appears to play a role in the structure and dynamics of the outer, partial ring and Moon 1989 N3 is associated with the inner, complete ring. Deseret News, Aug. 23, 1989 - edited)


VOYAGER 2 STREAKS TOWARD NEPTUNE
Three days out from Neptune, NASA's Voyager 2 probe closed in on its target Tuesday, its computer programmed to search for more partial rings and to beam back priceless photos of the planet and two of its moons. Hurtling through space at nearly 38,000 mph - some 22 times faster than an M-16 rifle bullet - Voyager 2 was 2.5 million miles from bluish Neptune early Tuesday, with its aging systems "go" for a long-awaited low-altitude flyby, expected about 9:55 p.m. MDT Thursday. The 1-ton spacecraft's tiny attitude control rockets were fired Monday in the final such course correction ever planned for Voyager 2, precisely lining the craft up for its fourth and final planetary encounter since launch 12 years ago on a path carrying it past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and now Neptune.

If all goes well, Voyager 2 will sail 3,000 miles over the cloud tops of Neptune at close approach, and five hours later the probe will pass within about 25,000 miles of Triton, one of Neptune's six known moons. Spectacular color photos were released Monday showing details of a giant storm system in Neptune's frigid atmosphere, so large that the Earth "would just about fit into it," scientists said. The storm was discovered months ago, but with each new picture, more detail is revealed.

Equally exciting to many scientists were fuzzy, long-range images of Triton, a moon in a class by itself when it comes to strange environments. Before the Voyager encounter, scientists suspected the presence of a transparent atmosphere, and images returned from space in recent days appear to confirm that belief. "It may snow from time to time in places, there may be heavy frost laid down," said astronomer Bradford Smith. "What we would really like to do is to get some idea of what Triton's geological history has been. It's a strange satellite, it's in the wrong orbit, it's going backwards around Neptune and something truly catastrophic must have happened at some time in its past." He said the surface of the moon is "almost certainly some sort of ice, probably methane ice."We have some idea of what may be going on on Triton," Smith said. "The surface is bright, that would suggest we're seeing frost or snow of some sort. There may be small patches of water frost. "Now most of that surface may be frozen methane, but it's hard to get reflectivity from frozen methane up to that 90 percent level. One way to do it is with water frost and another way is with nitrogen frost, bizarre ices."

The storm in Neptune's atmosphere, similar to a tremendous high pressure system on Earth that rotates in a counterclockwise direction, was discovered months ago by Voyager 2 as the probe hurtled toward the distant planet. It is called, appropriately enough, the "Great Dark Spot." Neptune's atmosphere is made up primarily of methane, which absorbs red and orange light from the sun and reflects the blues and greens. Images beamed back from Voyager 2 show a richly bluish world with a wealth of unexpected structure and detail. "Methane, of course, is just what we call natural gas; it's the same thing that you cook your food and heat your homes with," Smith said. "Neptune is blue; the dark spot is also blue, it just isn't quite as blue as the rest of the atmosphere." At Neptune's distance from the sun - 2.8 billion miles - the planet receives far less sunlight than Uranus, the next planet in toward the sun. Yet both planets are about the same temperature, 60 degrees above absolute zero, indicating that Neptune must have an internal heat source that is "driving" the atmosphere. (Deseret News, Aug. 22, 1989)

Offline Ares67

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Re: Atlantis STS-34 – Eppur si muove!
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