Harvard Experiments on Future Shuttles

Four scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics last week watched the second mission of the space shuttle with special interest, for they are hoping to use the shuttle as a laboratory in years to come.

Giovanni G. Fazio, Paul Gorenstein, John L Kohl and William H. Parkinson each have an experiment that has been accepted by NASA for use in the so-called "space lab" flights of the space shuttle slated to begin in 1983. During the space-lab missions, the back bay of the Columbia--which has been empty in these preliminary flights--will be filled with 12 or more astronomical experiments.

When Columbia was still in the planning stages, NASA sponsored a competition to fill the experiment slots on the space lab flights. Applications, complete with projected costs and size of equipment, were received from around the world.

Cutbacks in NASA funding and the space shuttle's budget over-runs have forced NASA to "stretch out" some of the experiment proposals they originally had accepted, James Cornell, a spokesman for the Center for Astrophysics, said Monday. "Stretched out is a euphemistic phrase for postponed indefinitely although not canceled," Cornell added.

Three of the four Harvard proposals have been stretched out but at least one of the scientists is not discouraged. Paul Gorenstein, lecturer on Astronomy, said Sunday that "Valuable experiments have been proposed and many of them will be done in one form or another through some means." He added that the diminishing federal support for NASA may be a "good idea" in the face of a troubled economy.

Giovanni Fazio, who is also a lecturer on Astronomy, is the only Harvard scientist with a definite slot for his experiment--on space lab II, the shuttle's 22nd flight, now scheduled for 1984. Fazio's proposal is a telescope designed to detect regions in the galaxy where stars are being born. On earth such a telescope is cluttered by infrared rays from "atmospheric junk," Fazio explains. An infrared telescope on the space shuttle, however, would be expected to collect more accurate and complete data.

A unique aspect of Fazio's project is that the telescope's mirror will be cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero in order to ensure that the mirror does not give off infrared light of its own and distort the telescope's reception.

Gorenstein's proposal--still on hold--is a "large area module array of reflectors," known as LAMAR, which is designed to detect X-rays from a range of sources including stars, galaxies and black holes. "LAMAR will allow us to precisely locate various cosmic objects and lead us to a better understanding of their nature," Gorenstein said, adding that LAMAR's bank of reflectors will also simultaneously survey the universe at a wider angle than previously possible.

John Kohl, an associate of the Harvard College Observatory, has designed an ultraviolet coronograph for the space shuttle that will take advantage of Columbia's position above the earth's atmosphere. A coronograph is a telescope engineered specifically for observing the corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun, by blocking the light of the sun's disk. The corona, an area of extremely low density and high temperature, can be most clearly observed naturally during a solar eclipse. Kohl's coronograph would pick up the ultraviolet light emitted by the corona and analyse it to reveal the density and velocity of the particles in the corona.

The fourth Harvard scientist with a space shuttle experiment, William Parkinson, associate director of the Center for Astrophysics, could not be reached for comment on his project--a solar and terrestrial atmosphere spectrometer. Spectrometers are used to analyze the composition of gases by the unique characteristics of the light emitted by each element