ENDEAVOUR steps up to the plate October 6, 2008—Members of the press who were boning up on the Hubble Space Telescope will be dealing with another NASA acronym in the coming weeks…SARJ. It’s the Solar Alpha Rotary Joint that swivels one set of solar panels on the International Space Station. It doesn’t work, and NASA wants the Endeavour crew to fix it.
NASA is talking a lot about solar power during the upcoming mission of Space Shuttle Endeavour. The International Space Station had a balky set of solar panels. The long wings are supposed to track the sun to create the maximum amount of electricity. The faulty set of panels doesn’t do that because of a swiveling joint with gears that grind instead of moving smoothly. NASA thinks gold plating on the gears that’s supposed to lubricate the parts wore off prematurely. The Endeavour crew will try to replace these bearings to fix the problem. Their mission patch is pictured to the left. The agency also wants to move the launch up by two days. The reason is that later in the year the amount of sunlight hitting the station’s panels gets weaker. Again, power is the issue.
On the book front, hard cover copies of “Final Countdown” will be available in bookstores throughout the holiday season before an updated edition goes into paperback in the Spring of 2009. University Press of Florida also asked me to sign on to write a follow-up book.
One final note, The Florida Historical Society is publishing a special edition of its quarterly journal to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the creation of NASA. They've kindly asked me to the write the introduction, and you can look for it in the coming weeks.
More to come---
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Also, many thanks to all came to my first talk for the Florida Humanities Council about my book “Final Countdown”. The State agency invited me to join its “Road Scholar” program to give talks and book signings throughout