In Brief:
September 7, 1999
Web posted at: 2:08 p.m. EDT (1808 GMT)
Liberty Bell 7 to go on public display
(CNN) -- The Kansas Cosmosphere will open its Liberty Bell 7
restoration area to public on Wednesday. Gus Grissom's spacecraft, which had been lying on ocean floor, will be seen by public for first time in 38 years.
The capsule was salvaged by a recovery expedition in July sponsored by the Discovery Channel.
Kelly Space awarded $2.1 million NASA contract
(CNN) -- Kelly Space & Technology Inc. has been awarded a $2.1 million contract by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to continue work on the next phase of a study that will focus on the development of space transportation through the year 2030, the company said Tuesday.
Under the three-month contract, Kelly Space will develop
approaches to meet NASA's future space flight requirements from the year 2000 through the year 2030, the company said.
Kelly Space is a commercial reusable space transportation systems development and operations company headquartered at the San Bernardino International Airport, the former Norton Air Force Base, in Southern California.
No trace of Lunar Prospector crash
(CNN) -- None of the hundreds of amateur and professional astronomers who watched the crash of NASA's Prospector orbiter into the moon saw evidence of a hope-for water and dust plume.
Using everything from home-built telescopes to powerful Earth-orbiting observatories, observers looked for a trail of dust and possible water vapor from the probe's July 31 planned crash into a crater.
"There was no huge water signal or we would have seen that easily," said David Goldstein, who led the University of Texas team that proposed the south polar crash.
The crash had only a 10 percent chance of yielding such a plume, a sign of water trapped in the lunar surface. Earlier evidence from the orbiter's 18-month mission had pointed indirectly to water trapped in tiny dots throughout the moon, so scientists sought direct evidence.
The controlled crash drove the spacecraft into a crater the size of a small city.
If dust had arisen, it would indicate a rim landing, Goldstein said. Instead, the absence of dust indicates the orbiter probably landed directly in the crater.
The result doesn't mean that water is absent at the moon. It is possible that the energy of the crash was insufficient to separate water molecules from the dust it stirred up, Goldstein said.
Also, the spacecraft might have simply struck a dry spot.
Powerful telescopes looked with spectrometers for a nearly transparent haze of water vapor and molecules that might have drifted above the moon for hours after the crash. The results from that effort will be announced in the coming weeks.
The spacecraft was launched in January 1998, heading for orbit around the moon. Scientists say Lunar Prospector provided them with invaluable global maps of the moon's gravitational and magnetic fields and a better understanding of its composition.
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