Daily News Wednesday, November 18, 1992 24-hour audio service at 202/755-1788 % Discovery work at Pad 39-A continues; payload to be installed tomorrow; % Advanced Communications Satellite Workshop opens today in Washington; % NASA completes negotiations with McDonnell Douglas for Spacelab support; % Hubble briefing tomorrow to feature photo of Black Hole accretion disk; % October was busy month for Marshall and Ames education specialists. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Preparations for the December launch of Discovery for the STS-53 Department of Defense mission are continuing at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39-A. The orbiter and associated stack components will be powered up today and the KSC crew will begin aft orbiter compartment and solid rocket booster closeouts later this afternoon. A minor concern cropped up during the hot-fire test of the orbiter's hydraulic auxiliary power units, which showed APU #1 to have a higher than acceptable fuel-inlet pressure reading. A change-out of the unit is under consideration, which could be accomplished in existing contingency time associated with Discovery's remaining launch preparations. Otherwise there appear to be no concerns. The DOD payload will be installed in Discovery's payload bay tomorrow. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Today and tomorrow at the Sheraton Washington Hotel NASA will co-host a conference on the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite. Other conference co-hosts are Comsat Laboratories, the Harris Corporation, and MITRE Corp. The satellite is scheduled for launch aboard a shuttle flight scheduled for launch in mid-1993. It was developed by NASA in cooperation with the American satellite communications industry to support future high- risk communications needs which fell outside the sponsorship capabilities of the private sector and reflects a three-decade long history of such technology development by NASA. The conference will feature representatives from Rockwell International, Motorola, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the U.S. Army Space Command, and Georgetown University. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * NASA and McDonnell Douglas have completed negotiation of a cost-plus-award-fee contract worth $163 million to provide continuation of Spacelab integration activities at contractor and agency facilities at both the Marshall and Kennedy Space Centers. The contract has provisions for four 1-year extensions of between $27 and 34 million. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * This Thursday, Nov. 19, at 1:00 pm EST in the NASA Headquarters auditorium, Dr. Walter Jaffee, Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands, and other astronomers, will present the first image taken of a giant dust disk surrounding a suspected black hole. The image, acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope, clearly shows the saucer- like disk and is the first visual view of the phenomenon of galactic accretion long linked with black holes but previously never seen. In addition to Dr. Jaffee, NASA astronomer Steve Maran, University of Washington astronomy professor Bruce Margon and Pennsylvania State University astronomy professor Daniel Weedman will discuss the significance of this new Hubble finding. The briefing will be shown live on NASA Select television. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Education specialists at NASA centers report a busy October of school presentations, student science fairs and Space- and Aero-mobile tours. At Marshall, their three Spacemobile lecturers visited 45 schools and conducted a total of nearly 200 presentations reaching over 21,000 students. At Ames Research Center, educators visited 60 schools in the Pacific Northwest including two special teacher workshops held in Alaska. Marshall also reports the center's Space Station Freedom trailer exhibit has played to large and enthusiastic crowds in the Hartford area, where they were set up last week to support the NASA Town Meeting held there yesterday. The trailers were set up in West Hartford at the Science Museum of Connecticut, where more than 3,500 visitors toured through the space station mockups daily. Local Hartford electronic media also used the trailers as the site for phone-in radio shows and television reports of local citizen reaction. The trailers are being moved to Indianapolis for the next town meeting there on Friday, Nov. 20. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Here's the broadcast schedule for Public Affairs events on NASA Select TV. Note that all events and times may change without notice, and that all times listed are Eastern. Live indicates a program is transmitted live. Wednesday, November 18, 1992 Live 12:00 pm NASA Today news program, today featuring a report on yesterday's NASA Town Meeting at the University of Hartford in Connecticut; a report from the Marshall Space Flight Center about their work on the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor; a look at what is being done to help investigators find a downed aircraft and be able to track the "black box" even if the box falls into deep water; a peek into the world of supercomputers and a new project just initiated between supercomputer maker Cray Research and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and as usual, a look back at today's date in NASA History. 12:15 pm Aeronautics & Space Report. 12:30 pm Sail on Voyager. 1:30 pm Space Navigation. 2:00 pm Starfinder program #1. 2:30 pm Life in the Universe. 3:00 pm Total Quality Management program #69 from the University of New Mexico series. 4:00 pm 8:00 pm and 12:00 midnight - NASA Today and subsequent programming repeats. This report is filed daily at noon, Monday through Friday. It is a service of NASA's Office of Public Affairs. The editor is Charles Redmond, 202/453-8425 or CREDMOND on NASAmail. NASA Select TV is carried on GE Satcom F2R, transponder 13, C-Band, 72 degrees West Longitude, transponder frequency is 3960 MegaHertz, audio subcarrier is 6.8 MHz, polarization is vertical.