Jeff has been involved in aerospace journalism since the mid 1990s. Prior to joining Aviation Week, Jeff served as managing editor of Launchspace magazine and the International Space Industry Report. He has been the editor and chief of Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily & Defense Report since 2007 and has been a regular contributor to Aviation Week magazine. He received his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
An experimental laser sensor has been flight-tested at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California as part of the Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology (Alhat) program aimed at future robotic lunar missions. The light-detection and ranging (lidar) sensor is designed to recognize the landing site during final descent, detect hazards such as craters or boulders and direct the lander to a safer touchdown spot. For the tests at Dryden, a helicopter flew repeated tracks over two target areas on the dry lakebed, at altitudes increasing to 6,200 ft.
Initial launch pad checks of the space shuttle Atlantis for its mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope should be getting underway during the first week of September, pending the resolution of orbiter/external tank umbilical mating difficulties. Atlantis was to roll out to Launch Complex 39A as early as Aug. 30, but United Space Alliance technicians had difficulty extracting a jammed ground support system bolt used initially to align the hydrogen umbilical side of the tank’s massive rigging structure with the orbiter’s belly.
Rigorous trajectory requirements for a pair of NASA aeronautics experiments probably contributed to a loss of control that forced range-safety destruction of their Alliant Techsystems ALV-X1 launcher last week. Kent Rominger, vice president of advanced programs at ATK, says the “very unique and demanding” trajectory imposed by the Hypersonic Boundary Layer Transition (HyBolt) experiment and the Sub-Orbital Aerodynamic Re-entry Experiment (Soarex) may have overtaxed vehicle control systems on the experimental vehicle.
