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Support To The World 's Space Programs

JPL has over the years supported many space missions not primarily under JPL responsibility, and in some cases not under NASA responsibility. This support has varied from case to case, but has been of sufficient importance that the club has recognized the key events with commemorative covers.

Pioneer Venus

The Pioneer program has been a long-running planetary solar system exploration program managed by NASA Ames Research Center. The JPL has supported these missions through tracking with the Deep Space Network, and also providing navigation analyses to the mission operators. No commemorative covers were produced for the Pioneer missions before Pioneer Venus (PV). Pioneer Venus consisted of two satellites which were launched in 1978- one in May destined for entry into the atmosphere, and the other in August, to be placed in orbit around the planet. The club commemorated their arrival, 5 days apart, using two color variations of the Navigation Team PV logo as the theme for these two commemorative covers. These events were PV Multi-probe Venus Encounter (12b), and PV Orbiter Orbit Insertion (12a).

Spacelab 3

The Shuttle has carried several JPL spacecraft (Magellan, Galileo), and JPL-associated spacecraft (Ulysses, Hubble Space Telescope), and these have commemorated by the club printed cachets. Many STS flights contain JPL instruments, and generally these missions are given significance by a variety of the rubber stamp cachet used to service all STS launches (see Rubber Stamp Cachet Service section). These will be discussed in chapter 12. For Spacelab 3, however, the club produced a printed cachet for Spacelab 3 launch aboard STS-51B to celebrate the first JPL employee to be a crew member on the Shuttle. Dr Taylor Wang was a payload specialist, and operated his Drop Dynamics Module during the mission. The cachet represented the STS mission logo as well as the DDM logo and the logo of the ATMOS experiment- which was another important JPL experiment on-board.

Hubble Space Telescope

JPL supplied the Wide Field/ Planetary Camera (WF/PC) for the Space Telescope. This is one of the primary instruments, and is designed to be replaceable in orbit. The launch of the telescope with WF/PC by STS-31 on April 24, 1990 was commemorated with a two-color cachet designed from project drawings of the camera and translated to camera-ready art - also by Penny Crafton on the MAC computer. This was a departure from the project logo custom for launch covers, (since we didn't have a project logo.)

Olympus

A spacecraft built by the European Space Community was tested in 1984 in the JPL solar thermal vacuum chamber. This large spacecraft was a high technology telecommunications satellite called Olympus. The Olympus Thermal Vacuum Test event was commemorated with a rubber stamp cacheted cover produced by the stamp club. In addition to 200 produced for the European project team, 250 were produced for JPL and others interested in club covers.

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