Faced with rising fuel prices, US President Bill Clinton authorised the sale of $227 million worth of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The Dutch-Italian Beppo-SAX launched from Cape Canaveral as the first X-ray mission capable of simultaneously observing targets over more than 3 orders-of-magnitude of energy
US President Bill Clinton authorised the sale of $227 million worth of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a strategic economic and energy policy decision aimed at managing national petroleum resources. US gas prices were at their highest levels in 5 years
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President Clinton, moving to blunt Republican efforts to capitalize on public anger at rapidly rising gasoline prices, on Monday ordered the sale of as much as 12 million barrels of oil from the U.S. emergency petroleum reserve.
“Over the last several weeks, I have been concerned about the rise in gasoline prices at the pump,” Clinton said in a written statement issued late Monday.
He said that he had directed Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary to take immediate steps to begin the “orderly sales” of 400,000 to 600,000 barrels of oil a day.
The oil will begin moving on the market next month but the total amount of the sale represents less than a single day’s U.S. consumption and the impact on gasoline prices is expected to be a few pennies a gallon at most.
Although the White House sought to claim credit for rapid response to consumer wrath over gasoline prices, Clinton was forced into the sale by Congress, which last week ordered him to sell $227 million worth of excess petroleum stocks to pay for administration education programs.
Dutch Itallian Beppo-SAX launches from Cape Canaveral
BeppoSAX was an Italian–Dutch satellite for X-ray astronomy which played a crucial role in resolving the origin of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the most energetic events known in the universe.
It was the first X-ray mission capable of simultaneously observing targets over more than 3 orders-of-magnitude of energy, from 0.1 to 300 kiloelectronvolts (keV) with relatively large area, good (for the time) energy resolution and imaging capabilities (with a spatial resolution of 1 arc minute between 0.1 and 10 keV).
BeppoSAX was a major programme of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) with the participation of the Netherlands Agency for Aerospace Programmes (NIVR).
The prime contractor for the space segment was Alenia while Nuova Telespazio led the development of the ground segment.
Most of the scientific instruments were developed by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) while the Wide Field Cameras were developed by the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) and the LECS was developed by the astrophysics division of the European Space Agency's ESTEC facility.
BeppoSAX was named in honour of the Italian physicist Giuseppe "Beppo" Occhialini. SAX stands for "Satellite per Astronomia a raggi X" or "Satellite for X-ray Astronomy".[