Apollo, Space & Science

End of the Shuttle Program - Part II - Early memories

2011-09-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

I came of age at about the same time as the Space Shuttle did. I don't remember the first time I heard of the shuttle but it might have been when it was announced officially during the Apollo 16 flight to the Moon in 1972. I was an avid Apollo viewer back then at age 11 or 12 and could have called myself an "Apollo Geek" like I do today. While disappointed in the end of Moon flights, NASA and the U.S. Government advertised a robust future which included the Shuttle lifting things like space stations and telescopes and satellites into orbit. It would fly almost weekly and be treated much like an airliner with only routine maintenance between flights. Early plans had it lofted into the stratosphere piggyback on a winged booster that would return to land on a runway like the shuttle itself would at the end of its mission. Ultimately, shuttle would support those planned missions to Mars, if not in the late 1980s, then maybe in the 1990s or thereabouts. As my interests in space grew into an interest in science and then in Astronomy in particular, I watched as the shuttle started to become reality. I was in high school in 1977 when the Enterprise was rolled out and then made its first un-powered drop tests by the end of that year. The sight of the shuttle being carried on the back of a 747 was awe inspiring.

As I graduated from high school in 1978, the shuttle program was advancing, but appeared to be a bit delayed. Early estimates would have had its first launch about the time I graduated, but it was now projected into late 1979 or even 1980. Having watched SkyLab fly over with humans on board, I had hoped an early shuttle flight would visit America's first space station and provide a much needed reboost before it re-entered the atmosphere. NASA even talked about such a mission. As I entered college at the University of Arizona in Tucson in the fall of 1978, I looked forward to many years of space shuttle flights starting soon, but the delays kept adding up. It had been more than 3 years since the last Apollo flight that had docked with the Soyuz during the Apollo Soyuz Test Project and the interval before more human flights into space by American Astronauts seemed way too long. Then, during my first full summer in Tucson, in 1979, it was clear that the SkyLab rescue mission was just not going to fly in time - SkyLab was dropping literally like a rock and would de-orbit soon and shuttle was at least a year off. I watched SkyLab fly over that summer and on the morning of July 11, 1979, I watched in the pre-dawn sky as it made one of its last orbits around Earth. A few hours later, it burned up over the Indian ocean, dropping bits of wreckage onto Australia.

I was an avid space nut, infected by moonwalking astronauts at a young age, so I paid close attention to the development of the shuttle. Columbia appeared fresh out of the factory at Palmdale CA and was flown across country on that 747, complete with lots of missing tiles. It's first flight was still a long ways off, but at least it's preparation would be happening near its launch pad.

In December 1980, I was in Florida for Christmas visiting my parents who had moved to Miami when my Dad (who was in the Coast Guard) was transfered there. We went up to Merritt Island to visit my Uncle James. Since he worked at KSC, he got a car pass so that we could go to the rollout of Columbia to the launch pad for its first ever flight. The majestic but microscopically slow crawl to the pad took a long time, but we watched in a large crowd outside the VAB as its white tank and boosters preceded the shuttle out of the huge assembly building. Things looked very different to these eyes trained to watch Apollo Saturn V rockets going to the pad - the launch platform no longer contained the huge access tower and the Shuttle and its tank and boosters looked like they might just fall over standing there apparently unsupported. Of course, the launch tower of the Saturn V provided no support, just access and with the Shuttle, the launch tower was now affixed to the launch pad and the crawler would take the platform with shuttle out there. We watched the stack creep out of the massive VAB - the shuttle was huge, but was dwarfed by the even more huge VAB and would have been dwarfed by a Saturn V as well. The crew of Columbia's STS-1 flight spoke to the crowd. John Young and Bob Crippen talked of all the hope and expectations that we all had for the space shuttle. We stood on a crawler track next to one of the old Saturn V launch towers on a cold Florida December morning. I was quite impressed.

Almost 4 months later on April 12, 1981, I sat in front of a color TV as the countdown for STS-1 proceeded. There on TV was the same shuttle stack that I had watched leaving the VAB. I watched in anticipation - there had been a scrub 2 days earlier - as the countdown proceeded. And finally a sight more spectacular than a Saturn V launch appeared on screen. The Saturn V used kerosene and oxygen in its first stage and its thrust to weight ratio was closer to 1.0 than the Shuttle, so it slowly rose off the launch pad and into the sky in an almost stately manner on a tail of flame and a little dark colored smoke. Columbia lept off the launchpad like a bucking bronco! It's solid rocket motors were bright and spectacular as it climbed into the sky, slowly rolling into the right direction before starting to pitch over as it rose into the clear blue sky. It left a trail like none I'd ever seen during Apollo!

Two days later, I was watching the TV again, this time a view from Edwards Air Force Base in California as we prepared for the impending arrival of the first glider from outer space. Would the shuttle be able to re-enter safely? It had lost some tiles on launch, so that was worrisome (it would have been much more so if we had known the ultimate fate of Columbia, but that is a story for another blog). A spacecraft had never flown like an airplane back into the atmosphere before. And the shuttle had exactly one chance to hit the runway - there was no going around since it had no jet engines and was only a glider. Finally, after watching cameras pan over the crowds out at Edwards, all awaiting the shuttle's return, we heard the now well known double sonic booms and then the long range tracking cameras picked up the shuttle high over the California desert. The dark black-tiled belly of the orbiter looked so majestic as it made its turns overhead and soon, the T-38 chase planes caught up to it, diving for the desert floor trying to keep up with the flying brick that was Columbia. As the mountains appeared in frame, the landing gear dropped and then, it was kicking up dust on the dry lakebed runway it was touching down on. Then the nosewheels dropped and it rolled for what seemed like forever. Later, we watched, still fascinated with this new spacecraft, as John Young, still in his golden-brown spacesuit bounded down the stairs, fist pumping and obviously very energized as he walked around the orbiter by the first space shuttle landing from orbit! The Shuttle era was upon us!

Here is a video with highlights from the STS-1 flight of Columbia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuzuWmno-X8

Watching the 2nd launch of Columbia wasn't quite as memorable, but I watched as long as the networks would cover them. In November 1982, I went to Edwards myself to watch the landing of STS-5. It was an overcast morning and when we heard the sonic booms, the shuttle was nowhere to be seen as it circled high above the clouds overhead. Just before landing, it dropped through the clouds and was on the runway in seconds. In years that followed, I watched shuttles overhead in orbit. I watched shuttles deliver satellites into orbit. I watched astronauts try out their own little spacecraft in the "Manned Maneuvering Units" or MMUs. I watched them retrieve and repair satellites. The space shuttles seemed to be delivering on their promise and were ramping up slowly in launch rates. By 1985, they launched a record 9 flights into orbit. Spaceflight was becoming routine, or so it seemed.

The End of the Shuttle program - part I

2011-09-08T13:02:00.001-07:00

It's been 2 months since I watched Atlantis rocket into the Florida sky on its way to the International Space Station. I'll cherish my memories of that day as well as those that followed as we first watched the launch, then watched the SRBs return to port, then eventually, we watched the last space shuttle landing before returning to reality and home. About 8 minutes after Atlantis disappeared behind the cloud deck about 40 seconds after liftoff, I continued to intently listen to the NASA TV audio - long after about half of the other viewers at Space View Park were heading for their cars and the long parking lot streets they must have experienced. I listened to all the launch calls and all the abort mode calls as I was amazed at how quickly people started leaving. Launch wasn't over! SRB sep still hadn't happened and they were heading for the exits. It was like Dodger stadium in the 6th inning! Out of sight, out of mind - as soon as the shuttle pierced the cloud deck and vanished above the clouds, folks were off. They hadn't even got to the "Go at throttleup" call & they were heading out. Finally, I heard the call I was waiting for - "MECO!" That's when I take my first deep breath, knowing that everything went fine all the way into orbit. Until then, they are still launching and there are still a gazillion things that can go wrong and cause NASA and our brave crew to have a bad day. "MECO." I hear over the Space View Park loudspeaker. I pumped my fist into the air and called out "They're in orbit!" And then I also pointed out: "135 launches and not a single failure in the 3 main engines on all of those flights!" Back in April 1981, if you'd asked me what the most likely cause of the first shuttle accident, I would have said it was the shuttle main engines. They have to burn perfectly for about 8 and a half minutes & there are so many moving parts and so many things pushed to unimaginable limits. No way they would fly 135 times and not once have a significant failure! Well, they did. There were a couple close calls - just before Challengers fatal flight, an engine shut down in flight a little early, but it was only a sensor error and it was late enough during launch that the shuttle was able to limp into orbit with the only ever abort call during launch, "Abort to Orbit" where they burned the other engines a little longer and made it into a useful orbit without having to make an emergency landing at some runway around the world. There was another close call during the first launch with a female commander when the engine nozzles had a small leak in a propellant line used to cool the engine bells. But that wasn't in the guts of the main engines even. 135 times 3 times 8.5 minutes (less about 7 minutes for 3 of them on poor Challenger). That is about 57 hours of main engine burn time! If you had told me that the main engines would burn for almost 2.5 days without a single failure back in 1981, I would have laughed you out of the room.

The shuttle was an amazing vehicle, despite its flaws and shortcomings. In a few blog posts, I plan to talk a bit more about the Space Shuttle. I just wanted to start this off on the 2 month anniversary of the last ever Space Shuttle launch. Click on this link to see my view of that launch: http://pixofmyuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/go-atlants-go.html

SpaceFest III - Thursday and Friday

2011-06-08T17:44:00.008-07:00

Spacefest III was held at the Starr Pass resort in Tucson this past weekend (June 2-5). Kim and Sally Poor of NovaSpace Galleries here in Tucson have organized the Spacefest since its first one 4 years ago. Kim contacted me earlier this year and asked if I would speak at this years event and I gladly agreed. Later, he asked if I could help with the Kitt Peak tour which I also agreed to do. One of the benefits of speaking was that I got to go to the event for free - definitely a great tradeoff.

When I got to Starr Pass on Thursday morning around 7AM I quickly found the meeting site for the tour bus that would take us to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum and then up to Kitt Peak. Eventually all 33 folks would gather there including a group of 12 students and two teachers from Aiglon College in Switzerland. Aiglon College is a boarding school at the U.S. High School level and the boys were ages from 14 to 16. The head of the program, teacher Christopher Starr was attending his 2nd Spacefest and from the start, it was obvious that the 12 boys in his care would enjoy their 8 day trip to Arizona. They had already visited Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon and Meteor Crater. They were in for the time of their lives as they would get to meet some of the most famous men in Space history. But first, the Desert Museum would present its fantastic array of plants and animals to them. I sat next to Christopher on the bus ride to the museum and after getting off the bus, I told him that if any of his students had any sorts of questions, especially about Astronomy, I'd be happy to talk with them.

Inside the Desert Museum, I met up with the students from Aiglon College and as the group split up heading for various parts of the place, two of the students stayed close to me. One of them, Dom, is an astronomy enthusiast. It was fun having them with me as I went about exploring a museum (really a modern zoo) with my camera, hunting for so many things that it had been a few years since I'd seen.

We left the Desert Museum by about 11:45, heading for Kitt Peak. I don't get to sit and watch the scenery very often since normally I'm busy driving. We met up with Travis Rector, a professor at the University of Alaska who used to work at NOAO. We split the group in half with Travis taking his half up to the 4-m and I took my half to Spacewatch, showing them both of our telescopes. After 45 minutes or so, we traded groups. Things went quite well and after a visit to the visitors center, we headed back for town, returning to the hotel about 10 minutes before the scheduled return time.

After getting my nametag and "speakers" ribbon, I almost immediately found Sy Liebergot (in the photo I am on the left with Sy, Michael Cassutt and Colin Burgess), sitting in the hotel bar with a few friends. I had been in e-mail contact with him in the past, so as soon as he saw my nametag, he eagerly introduced himself and it was like we had been friends for 20 years. He's somewhat opinionated and has a good memory for details and I enjoyed tallying my first 90 minutes of logged "Sy time" with him. Afterwards, I found a table of space artists including my friend Dan Durda and his mom as well as old friends and new friends Michael Carrol, Pamela Lee, Michelle Rouch, and Anil Rao.

Friday morning started a little late and began a trend. I had planned to see Adam Block's talk or at least Leonard David's talk, but we got up a little late and instead of watching only half a talk, I wandered into the exhibit room where all the vendors, artists and astronauts were located. After saying hello to Sally Poor, I wandered over to the artists table where Bill Hartmann was working on a small piece. Pam Lee was there as well. A short visit later, I wandered into the area where all my childhood heroes would be signing autographs. I saw Rusty Schweickart, but he had a crowd around him. Next to him was Ed Gibson, Skylab 3 astronaut with only one visitor, so I waited for my turn. I did not plan to get any autographs (which cost money), I think 5 minutes chatting with these legends is much more valuable than a signature on a photo or book. I introduced myself and told him about how he and his colleagues had inspired this then future scientist. On Christmas 1973, Gibson was aboard the SkyLab space station and I watched it fly over Governors Island in New York harbor where I lived at the time. I waved at the little point of light that I knew had 3 humans on it and said "Merry Christmas!". Gibson, obviously enjoyed the story but replied "I don't think I waved back." Then I told him about the first time I ever saw a live astronaut in person. The SkyLab 3 crew were presented the "Key to the City" of New York and I got to go to the even at City Hall with some of my classmates. We sat in the back of the room and breathed the same air as Ed Gibson and his two crewmates.

I did get to talk to Rusty Schweickart later in the day. He's very interested in the NEO impact threat and we had a lot in common to talk about. I got a picture of him later on as he talked with Joe Hecht, a fellow space nut.

I wandered around the corner and saw a room full of my childhood heroes, most with lines of 4 or more people awaiting their audience. On one side of the area, I saw Jim Lovell with a line of a dozen waiting to talk to him, Fred Haise, with about 8 folks in line, and I heard crickets chirping when I approached my "old friend" Sy Liebergot who sat patiently between the two Apollo 13 crewmembers who he helped return safely to planet Earth 41 years ago. So I said hello and proceded to add another half hour to my Sy Log.

Looking around the room, continuing to the left past Freddo was Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean. On a row perpendicular was Tom Stafford. To his left was an empty booth for Richard Hatch (Apollo of the original Battlestar Galactica), Charlie Duke, Walt Cunningham and Ed Mitchell. On a row perpendicular to that was Gene Cernan, Al Worden, Jack Lousma and empty booths for Dave Scott and Rick Searfoss (shuttle astronaut now working for XCOR). It was Space Geek heaven wandering around this area! I waited for the lines to be short, then I introduced myself and usually told the hero of mine that he and his colleagues had inspired me to become an astronomer. I spent a few minutes with Charlie Duke and he seemed genuinely interested to hear how he contributed to my success. I had met Dick Gordon before and chatted with him for a few moments. I noticed that the astronauts were particularly good about making you feel like you were an old friend whether they remembered you or not, whether they'd ever laid eyes on you before or not. They would very quickly glance at your nametag (sometimes without your even noticing) and then greet you personally: "Hi Jim! Nice to see you." I can't imagine that most of them would remember me personally considering all the folks they must meet, but it sure did make me feel welcome.

My only real disappointment was when I met Al Worden, CMP on Apollo 15. He was a nice guy and all, but after I told him how he and his colleagues had made a big difference in this astronomers life, he quickly steered the conversation into ancient Sumarians and the flying ships they apparently used. He referenced biblical passages and spouted other nonsense. I quickly tried to steer the conversation to something less upsetting, like the demise of the Space Shuttle program and the lack of future manned exploration plans....

My friend and fellow space artist Michelle Rouch produced some paintings for each of the Apollo flights with the flight number in Roman Numerals. She had the crewmembers sign them and got her picture taken with most of them. I happened to be on hand when she got Gene Cernan's autograph on the Apollo XVII work.

It was rapidly approaching time for the talks I really wanted to go to. Unfortunately, two of them were up against each other. My good friends David Levy and Dan Durda where scheduled in separate rooms at the same time. I had heard David talk recently and since he lives in town, I can get to see him more often, so I opted to go see Dan's talk about the future of private space flight. As always, he gave an excellent talk, displaying his enthusiasm for Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Blue Origin and a few other groups that are on the cusp of carrying many folks on suborbital flights into the fringes of space. Dan already has tickets on a few flights including number 245 on Virgin Galactic. He and his boss and friend Alan Stern are planning to do science on some flights along the lines of what he has done in the past out of Edwards AFB on F/A-18's. The "Lucky Duck" has flown centrifuge simulation runs for the flight profiles as well as taken off of the Shuttle runway at KSC in an F-104 Starfighter! Cool stuff! After Dan's talk, I should have snuck out to go see Carolyn Shoemaker talk, but I stayed and listened to Leslie Young talk about the New Horizons spacecraft mission to Pluto and beyond.

One of the problems with Spacefest is that there were so many things going on at once. There were 3 rooms with simultaneous speakers at any time which meant you had to pick which ones you saw. But at the same time, that reduced the congestion in the autograph area. While the lines for Gene Cernan, Jim Lovell, or Buzz Aldrin were a little long, they were not "around the block" long. There was also no lunch break the first day, though there was a special lunch with the astronauts that was as you'd expect, a little pricey. I decided to head down to one of the restaurants in the hotel for a quick lunch, planning to see Andy Chaikin talk first thing in the afternoon. Lunch took a little longer than I planned (and I admit, I was late getting to it), though it was faster than I should have possibly expected - I was in and out of a fancy place in less than half an hour and for an even $20 including the tip.

I got back to the Spacefest area about 10 minutes after Andy's talk began, so I found myself wandering into the autograph area again. I wandered quickly past the main collection of astronauts and around the corner behind the Cernan-Scott row were some more autograph booths. I walked past the first one and saw Dick Gordon talking to a pair in one long booth. As the identity of the two fellows slowly dawned on me, I saw their banner behind them. It was astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole from 2001: A Space Odyssey! Ok, it was really Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood. Both looked quite different from their youthful appearances, though Dullea was quite recognizable. Lockwood has put on quite a lot of weight since the days of 2001 and Star Trek (he appeared in one of the first ST episodes, Where No Man has gone Before). I stood listening to their conversation with Gordon and eventually put in a few words before wandering away.

My talk was scheduled for 3:30 on Friday afternoon. I was up against my friend Peter Smith, P.I. of the UofA's Phoenix mission to Mars. When Kim asked me to speak, he didn't specify what he wanted me to speak about. I decided to speak about Spacewatch and the impact hazard. I'd finished putting together my powerpoint slides after getting home the previous night (though I had most of it together already before that). I talked about the history of Spacewatch. How our computer back when I joined had a whopping 1.25 MB of RAM and 67 MB of hard drive space! Waving the Droid smartphone around got a laugh at the comparison. After talking about how we developed the first ever automatic asteroid detection software, I went on into some of our discoveries. I dwelled for almost 10 minutes on comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, knowing that two of the 3 discoverers were at the meeting (though David Levy had to leave around lunchtime and wasn't around by the time of my talk). I showed pictures of Tunguska as well as our telescopes. Finally, as I finished, I showed a timelapse of our 36 inch telescope at work on the sky. I had to run it outside of powerpoint as I couldn't get the video to not crash my OpenOffice session when I tried to import it into my file. I left about 10 minutes for questions and I got some good ones. The audience wasn't very big - maybe 20 people. One of the problems with having 3 simultaneous talks and a roomfull of famous astronauts.

Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute gave a talk about Pluto and what constitutes a planet after my talk. I stayed and watched (after grabbing a glass of water). He gave a good talk. Carolyn Shoemaker showed up for about the last 5 minutes of questions in my talk and I sat next to my friend through this talk.

With the talks done for the day, I wandered back into the exhibit hall, but it was near closing time and it was nearly empty. I wandered back towards the lobby area where the hotel bar is and a nice patio area with a view of the mountains and city where many of the Spacefest participants gathered. I found a small group out there with Peter Smith, Bill Boynton (both from the Lunar and Planetary Lab) as well as Leonard David and his wife Barbara, both journalists. I joined the group and we all enjoyed the company until it was time to leave for the night.

Annual time of Mourning at NASA

2011-01-28T21:42:00.003-07:00

There have been three fatal accidents involving NASA astronauts and their spacecraft. They all happened at this time of year. On January 27, 1967 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were running a "plugs out" test in their Apollo spacecraft atop the AS-204 Saturn IB rocket with the hatch sealed shut and the cabin pressurized to about 16.7 psi with pure oxygen. Hindsight is 20/20 and everyone was as shocked and surprised that no one foresaw the incredible hazard of such a configuration - pure oxygen at such pressures makes almost everything a fire hazard and it was pure luck over the previous 6 years that such an accident had not happened to a Mercury or Gemini spacecraft. Apollo was very much more complex and it had fallen behind schedule. Mistakes were made and the best estimate for what occurred is that a spark from some frayed wiring ignited a fire that rapidly spread through the cabin, asphyxiating the crew with smoke and fumes from the explosive fire. The crew was dead by the time the ground support personnel could get the inward opening hatch opened. The ensuing investigation uncovered flaws in design and workmanship as well as higher level decisions. Improvements in the Apollo spacecraft and in operations almost certainly saved the program from later disaster that could have ended the program.

25 years ago, on January 28, 1986, NASA launched its 25th Space Shuttle flight into a chilly Florida sky. The previous 24 flights were a model of success, at least from a casual perspective. The 24 flights included the first re-use of a manned spacecraft when Columbia launched on STS-2. It included the launch of a variety of spacecraft as well as the retrieval of a pair of malfunctioning spacecraft. It included the first spacewalks of the shuttle program as well as the first untethered spacewalk when Bruce McCandless flew a jet backpack called an MMU (Manned Maneuvering Unit) which was later used for the retrieval of the Solar Max satellite. But beneath the facade of success was a disaster waiting to happen. On many flights, hot gases caused damage to O-rings in the solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Rather than delay the program by stopping flight, disrupting a crowded flight schedule, NASA management chose to continue flight while working the problem in the background. On this cold January morning, the crew of STS-51L made its way to the launch pad like the 24 space shuttle crews before it. The crew consisted of 4 veteran shuttle astronauts including the 2nd woman and 2nd African American astronauts to fly as well as the first Asian American astronaut all making their 2nd spaceflights. The commander, also making his 2nd spaceflight was Francis R. "Dick" Scobee. The three rookies on this flight included teacher in space Christa McAuliffe. As space shuttle Challenger left Launch Complex 39B, the odds caught up with manned spaceflight as hot gases burned past the O-ring near the base of the right hand SRB releasing puffs of black smoke for a moment as the shuttle rose off the pad. For another 50 seconds or so, the leak sealed but as it flew through maximum dynamic pressure, the seal failed and the SRB began burning through, releasing hot gas that rapidly started damaging first the SRB, then the base of the giant orange external tank (ET) including the mount points of the SRB to the tank. 73 seconds into the flight the damage to the SRB and external tank reached catastrophic levels. In the preceeding moments, the flames from the SRB burned through the base of the Hydrogen tank at the bottom of the ET. The rear attachments of the SRB to the ET burned through allowing the SRB to hinge on the forward attachpoint. The nose of the SRB punctured the forward part of the tank where the Oxygen tank is located. The net thrust from leaking Hydrogen at the base of the ET pushed forward into the oxygen tank causing rapid disintegration of the ET. Without the ET to hold the vehicle together, the SRBs flew off into their "Y" shaped paths. There was no explosion - the hydrogen and oxygen cloud expanded with only minimal burning giving the distinctive shape to the expanding debris and vapor. Without the ET, the shuttle could only respond to all the forces acting on it. There was the thrust from the still burning 3 main engines. There were the aerodynamic forces of the airflow over the wings and aero surfaces. The net result was for the orbiter to pitch itself belly into the wind and the aerodynamic stress on Challenger caused it to shatter into pieces. The structurally strongest parts of the orbiter remained somewhat intact including the crew compartment and each flew out of the expanding debris cloud. There was evidence that the crew survived the initial breakup of the vehicle and possibly were alive (but likely unconscious) for the remainder of the fall to the ocean as the cabin flew upward another 3 miles before descending to the water below. The investigation revealed the cause of the disaster to be O-rings chilled to more than 30 degrees below the previous record cold launch temperature which in itself was almost 20 degrees below the rated temperature of the O-rings. Without a proper seal, the hot gas eroded through the O-rings and then into the case of the SRB before burning through and continuing to damage the vehicle. The orbiter was responding to the slightly varying thrust of the two SRBs and continued to try to fly even after the start of the breakup, adjusting the gimbal of the main engines to compensate. The root cause of the accident showed many similarities to the events of 19 years and a day earlier, though management not listening to the concerns of their staff combined with the need to meet demanding launch schedules kept the problem from being dealt with before the disaster happened.

8 years ago on February 1st the crew of space shuttle Columbia were returning home from a demanding 16 day mission of science. They did not make it home. Just 16 minutes from the runway at the Kennedy Space Center the shuttle broke up into debris similar to what had occured 17 years earlier, though moving at mach 18 over the skies of Texas. In the days and weeks that followed we learned that the shuttle and crew of 7 were doomed from nearly the start of their mission when a piece of ET foam broke away from the tank at about 82 seconds into the launch of mission STS-107 and slammed into the leading edge of the left wing of the orbiter at about 500 miles per hour. A piece of the light grey Reinforced Carbon Carbon leading wing surface broke free of the orbiter near the base of the left wing shortly after arriving in orbit. The hole in the wing would allow the hot gases of atmospheric entry inside the wing 16 days later during re-entry of the orbiter. The hot gases ate up the inside of the wing until it finally reached a critical point where the shuttle flew out of control and broke up due to aerodynamic forces. Once again, the crew cabin remained intact for some time after the breakup of the orbiter but was destroyed later as it fell into the thicker atmosphere. Pieces of Columbia were spread over parts of two states as they fell out of the sky. Many of the symptoms from the Challenger accident resurfaced in the face of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board analysis including signs and portents of disaster going all the way back to the earliest shuttle flights as debris strikes on the orbiter from launch were a problem on every flight. Most were harmless but required repair of the tiles between every flight. The 2nd flight after Challenger nearly caused the loss of orbiter Atlantis on STS-27 when a foam strike on the belly of the shuttle which caused over 700 "dings" to the belly and the loss of one tile and near burn through during re-entry. During the STS-107 mission, analysis of the debris strike underestimated the potential for damage to the orbiter and since the strike area was out of sight of the crew and believed to have been a glancing blow on the belly of the orbiter, the debris analysis suggested it would not produce significant damage. Only in hindsight when impact tests using a large gun that could shoot foam at speeds similar to those estimated during Columbia's flight into wing leading edge material did the potential for disaster become fully apparent.

These three accidents along with two fatal accidents in the Russian space program are reminders of the dangers of exploring new frontiers. The danger should never be forgotten but also should never prevent us from pursuing exploration. We learn from our mistakes and move on keeping the memory of lost pioneers in our minds to help motivate us to continue the work in their names while improving hardware and procedures to help minimize the chances for future accidents. Imagine if we stopped sailing the high seas the first time we lost a ship at sea! Here is to those who gave their all in the pursuit of space.

In the words of Gus Grissom: "If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

New Worlds

2010-11-04T15:56:00.006-07:00

(The animated GIF above was created by Emily Lakdawalla and appears in her blog) There are certain days in history where mankind gets its first closeup look at a world. Today is one of them. The EPOXI spacecraft which used to be known as Deep Impact, flew past comet 103P/Hartley 2 taking touristy snapshots as it zipped past the comet like a tourist driving quickly past the Grand Canyon. Admiring these images reminded me of a few other landmark days like this one that I remember. For example, July 20, 1976 when the Viking 1 lander landed on Mars and sent the first closeup images of Mars surface. Another July 20 springs to mind when in 1969 we watched Neil Armstrong plant the first human footprints on another world. And there are flyby's of Jupiter by Pioneer and later Voyager or the photos of Titan's surface when Cassini's Huygens lander touched down on that distant world. In the not too distant future, we'll see closeup images of Pluto when the New Horizons spacecraft flies past that ex-Planet and new Martian vistas when the next lander/rover arrives there in a year and a half or so. And the Messenger orbiter will be returning the highest resolution images of Mercury soon as well. We should also not forget the spacecraft orbiting our Moon and other planets like LRO, MRO, Cassini and many others. We live in a wonderful time when we get to see new worlds for the first time ever as well as seeing worlds we're used to seeing closeup even better than before. Those faint points of light in the sky at night are real places to be studied, someday with our own rock hammers, eyeballs and boots.

Double Rainbow, Double Rainbow

2010-08-22T10:28:00.003-07:00

Ok, so I was rinsing off in the shower this morning with sunlight beaming through the window and I noticed a Double Rainbow in the mist below and I thought to myself "Double Rainbow!". Then I realised something: it wasn't a real Double Rainbow since both rainbows had their spectrum going blue to red (from the inside to the outside of the arc - right to left). So I closed one eye and sure enough, one of the rainbows vanished. It's tough being a scientist sometimes. Next, I shifted my head to the right a bit and the Double Rainbow appeared with the 2nd one having the red to blue spectrum. It doesn't take much to make some folks happy.....

41 years and counting

2010-07-20T08:56:00.007-07:00

41 years ago today humans walked on another world for the first time... ever. There won't be another time that we'll ever be able to say that. The picture I've included here (and you can link to a higher resolution version if you click on the title) was the first image taken by Neil Armstrong after planting his bootprint into the alien soil. You can see one of the Lunar Modules landing gear legs as well as a white "jettison bag" laying under the LM. You can see one of the landing gear probes bent upward - one of the 3 probes (there wasn't one on the front leg to keep from interfering with the astronauts descent to the surface) that contacted the surface first during the descent which triggered a light in the cockpit telling the astronauts they were within about 6 feet of the surface and could turn off the descent engine.

I remember what I was doing when Armstrong took this picture. I was not quite 9 years old and sat transfixed in front of our black and white TV, watching the events a quarter million miles away in awe. Were the images fuzzy because of our TV or because they were being beamed from the distant orb that I could see in the sky? Probably both.

On this 41st anniversary, it is a bittersweet time. Our nation has decided to back off of its ambitious goals of returning to the Moon. After Apollo 11 and the 5 lunar landings that followed, we have retreated and lost our initiative, investing our incredible capabilities almost exclusively on planet Earth. We've lost our vision and drive to go out there and see what there is to see. We've been limited to sending unmanned probes to other planets and while they have returned remarkable image and data, we have not layed human eyes on an alien landscape since December 1972.

There are so many reasons we should get back out there beyond low Earth orbit. One of the best reasons is one of inspiration. When humans do the impossible, it inspires the rest of humanity to do more with their lives. I am one of many who was inspired by Apollo to reach for higher goals and in my case, I was inspired to become an Astronomer. Countless others went into fields of endeavor such as engineering, science, art, theater. With all the bad images we see on the news of war, terrorism, natural and manmade disasters, we need things like human exploration beyond Earth to help inspire our youth to what we might still think is the impossible.

Constellation canceled in NASA's 2011 budget

2010-02-03T20:47:00.003-07:00

With the announcement of President Obama's 2011 budget for NASA, the United States is apparently getting out of the Manned Lunar Exploration business that it has been tentatively involved in for the past 6 years. I am somewhat ambivalent about the details of this budget. First, I am terribly saddened that we are no longer going to be executing the Constellation program and my hopes to see humans walking on the Moon by 2020 have been all but ended. On the other hand, I am excited by the plans to fund new private space enterprise such as SpaceX and its Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft. Have I already seen the last humans to walk on the Moon in my lifetime - when I was 12 in December 1972?

The demise of the Constellation program really began when it started. The last time President Bush spoke about the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) was when he announced it in 2004. Since work on Constellation began it has been starved for cash so it is no wonder that it was behind schedule and also expected to cost so much more than originally estimated. It has been distressing to watch the progress of the Constellation program. We've seen a great deal of progress, particularly in the last year or so with the test flight of the Ares I-X, the completion of a launch platform for the Ares I, and the test firing of the first 5 segment solid rocket motor amongst other events. But with proper funding, those events should have occurred much sooner. The public squabbles of various factions of spaceflight and funding sources have been aired all too often in the past few years. Every interest group has weighed-in on Constellation pressing their own agenda. Pro-Mars exploration wants NASA to skip straight to Mars without a stop at the Moon. Commercial heavy lift rocket companies press for the cancellation of Ares I in favor of using the Atlas V or Delta IV Heavy. NASA insiders who want to build the Ares launch vehicles make claims about how hard it would be to man-rate the Atlas and Delta. NASA wants to maintain their monopoly on launching humans into space so they make arguments against companies like SpaceX building their Dragon spacecraft. Everyone is battling everyone else over their own domain and no one really wins.

At the rate NASA was being funded for its work on Constellation, could it ever have succeeded in taking us back to the Moon? The Augustine Commission estimated that it was short by about $3 billion a year in being able to carry out its mission on time. It is almost amazing that NASA has made as much progress as it had towards the goal of landing humans on the Moon.

It isn't all bad. The most prominent part of the new budget is the addition of $6 billion over 5 years to fund private space projects. This is long overdue. The best known private space company these days is probably SpaceX run by Paypal entrepreneur Elon Musk . They are building new rockets called Falcon which use their Merlin engines to power the rocket into orbit. The Falcon 1 has flown successfully with 1 of the Merlin engines powering its first stage and the Falcon 9 is expected to launch on its first test flight this spring with a cluster of 9 Merlin engines in its first stage. The Falcon 9 is designed to lift heavier payloads such as the Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX is already building the cargo version of the Dragon and will send a mockup of it on its first Falcon 9 launch with later cargo flights to the International Space Station. The Dragon was designed from the start to carry humans into orbit and Musk tells us that it will take about 3 years from the day he gets funding to launch humans into space on the Dragon. The launch escape system used to pull the Dragon safely away from an errant Falcon 9 rocket is the pacing item on the combo launching humans into space. Recent estimates for Orion making its first trip to ISS was as late as 2017! If the manned Dragon gets funding in the next year or so, it could be ferrying astronauts to ISS by 2014. But Dragon will also be able to take other passengers into space and to other destinations besides ISS. And their estimated price tag is just $20 million a seat. Other companies are also designing and building manned spacecraft. For example, Bigelow Aereospace is designing and building the first private space station based on inflatable habitats which could be an alternate destination for the Dragon. This could be the start of a new round of competative space travel and could open up the solar system eventually with trips not just to orbit, but to the Moon and beyond.

NASAs new budget also includes funding for increased scientific exploration as well as for advanced propulsion techniques. Imagine a new engine that would make travel to Mars take only weeks instead of months. And a heavy lift launch vehicle along the lines of the canceled Ares V is also apparently in the plan. There are also hints that a manned mission to an Asteroid and ultimately Mars is on the drawing board. But these are only rumors.

Besides the disappointment of the canceled Lunar program, I am also concerned that this new budget lacks a clear goal for NASA to pursue. There is no space station or moon base or space solar power project to drive the near term work in space. NASA needs a clear goal to justify building a large rocket. Keeping the ISS in operation until 2020 is probably a good thing despite the lack of a focused goal for ISS. Much of the research done there could be done much more cheaply with temporary platforms that could be visited or with long duration flights aboard smaller spacecraft. ISS is in the wrong orbit to serve as a waystation or launching platform for flights beyond low Earth orbit.

I am concerned for the future of manned spaceflight in this country. I am optimistic about the future progress of commercial spaceflight. I am pleased at the apparent support basic research and robotic missions into the solar system is getting. But I wonder if I will see humans reach beyond low Earth orbit again in my lifetime. I remember back to December 1972 as this 12 year old budding astronomer watched Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt working on the Moon during the last Apollo moonlanding thinking that I was going to be too young to be the first human to set foot on Mars - it was supposed to happen by some plans as early as the mid 1980s! Now, I wonder if I will even be around to see such an event.

Phoenix Lander on Mars

2008-05-27T15:00:00.003-07:00

This image of the Phoenix Lander on the surface of Mars was taken with the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter about 22 hours after Phoenix landed on the surface. The insets are closeups that are labeled and show not only the lander, but also the affects the landers rockets had on the surface surrounding the lander and also the heatshield and the backshell and parachute nearby on the Martian surface! You can even see some details in the parachute! Click on the image to see the full resolution version or visit the HiRISE website for this image for more details..

I'm not sure which direction the lander came in from, but it was probably the bottom right, though I also suspect that it might be the bottom left since the heatshield appears to have bounced towards the upper right. It looks like the wind may be blowing towards the bottom or bottom right since the parachute appears to have pulled the backshell towards the bottom and the chute itself is laying in that direction. Also, there appears to be a little wispy dark trail to the bottom right from the heatshield impact site. And my friend Joe who works on HiRISE says they should get some better images soon taken from closer range.

Phoenix lander on chutes with crater backdrop

2008-05-27T14:42:00.005-07:00

It gets even better! Yesterday, I posted about the HiRISE image of Phoenix on its parachute descending to the surface. Well, today, we get to see the bigger picture which shows the lander against a backdrop of the crater Heimdall which is about 20 km away with the spacecraft about 8-10 km above the surface. It looks as if the lander is heading straight for the crater, but that is due to the way the MRO spacecraft and HiRISE are looking obliquely across Mars to see the lander. Click on the image above to show the full resolution version. The inset at the lower left corner of the image shows a high resolution closeup of the lander which shows details in the parachute as well as the shroud lines and backshell enclosed lander.

Great work by the folks on MRO & HiRISE to plan for and actually succeed in taking this spectacular image! Coming soon: More pictures of the Phoenix Lander, this time on the surface of Mars!

Phoenix on its chutes

2008-05-26T14:17:00.003-07:00

Now how cool is this! The Phoenix Lander made a successful landing on Mars yesterday and while it was descending on its parachutes, the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this image of Phoenix. This is the first time that an orbiter has gotten an image of a lander in flight around another planet. Like I said, now isn't this COOL! You can see the parachutes, and the lander that is still in its backshell as well as the lines connecting the parachute to the backshell, all against the backdrop of the Martian surface below. I'm sure the HiRise camera will also be returning images of the lander on the Martian surface and I think the first attempt at that should already have been made and is just awaiting analysis.

APOLLO - Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation

2008-05-13T14:08:00.006-07:00

Now this is cool. As you may know, 3 of the Apollo missions and one of the Soviet Lunokhod rovers left laser retroreflector experiments with arrays of corner reflectors that would bounce a laser beam straight back from where it came, allowing Earthbased telescopes to measure the distance to the retroreflectors. Up until now, only the McDonald Observatory in Texas and a couple other experiments in other countries have been used to make such measurements and with a precision of something like a few centimeters.

This relatively new program that went into operation in 2005 uses the 3.5 meter telescope at Apache Point in New Mexico is called, somewhat appropriately, APOLLO. Incredibly, they've made big improvements over previous experiments such that they are achieving accuracies of about a millimeter in their distance measurements to the Moon! They are measuring times of photon returns to a few picoseconds! Their equipment receives photon returns substantially more efficiently than previous experiments.

With this kind of capability they will be able to test Einsteins theory of General Relativity as well as the precision of the inverse square law of gravity itself. It can measure the constancy of the Gravitational constant G, not to mention measuring the exact motion of the Moon as well as of their own observatory over time which includes the affects of continental drift, all to higher precision than has ever been done before.

Jim Oberg's article on the recent Soyuz re-entry anomalies

2008-05-08T20:13:00.002-07:00

Spaceflight is dangerous. It won't be anything routine and safe like air travel for a long time to come. The forces involved in launch and landing of a spacecraft are enormous and the vehicles us feeble humans have ingeniously designed and built are just barely in control of those forces.

The recent Soyuz re-entry that brought the Expedition 16 crew back to Earth is a prime example and reminder of that. One failure can spell doom for a ship and her crew as we are from time to time reminded so horribly by accidents like that of Columbia most recently and of Challenger, Soyuz 1 and Apollo 1. Happily, in this case, the failure appears to have been overcome by a design improvement after a similar re-entry glitch in early 1969 that nearly claimed the life of a Soviet Cosmonaut. It appears likely that the service module that supports the Soyuz spacecraft in orbit with rocket engines, supply tanks, and solar panels failed to separate from the re-entry module. And like a paper airplane, the combined vehicle began re-entry nose forward with the heat shield still nuzzled between the entry module and the service module. The front of the entry module is not designed to withstand the temperatures the heatshield is there for and not only contains a fragile hatch, but the parachutes that are needed to safely land the crew on the ground at the end of the flight. The new design which Oberg believes had been untested to this point allows the service module to break free during re-entry as the temperatures and atmospheric stresses build up on the vehicle even if the separation bolts fail to fire.

For more details, read Oberg's article here.

Flying Moondust

2007-11-24T16:10:00.001-07:00

Here is an interesting article about the possible dangers of flying moondust when we go back to the Moon, particularly to stay at moonbases. The film and video of lunar landings and liftoffs showed the dust flying off at high speeds. During landing, the Lunar Modules (LMs) descent engine scoured the surface as the lander approached, kicking dust out at speeds of probably around a kilometer per second. Without an atmosphere on the Moon, the dust will fly off on ballistic trajectories rather than billowing like it does on Earth during rocket launches that we see commonly on TV. The article above shows the affects of concrete blasted out of the flame trenches of the shuttle launch pads that drill holes in fences and damage other equipment. The smaller rockets used in landing on the Moon will not have enough force to blow big rocks out, but instead, it is the smaller dust that will be dangerous to equipment on the Moon at a moonbase.

Earthrise/Set

2007-11-14T18:56:00.001-07:00

You've got to check out the two HD videos posted on the Kaguya website. One shows Earthrise over the north pole of the Moon and the other shows Earthset over the lunar south pole. These are views I wish I could go look at with my own two Mk I eyeballs! The lunar south pole movie shows the crater Shackleton at the south pole which is thought to have perhaps the only place on the moon where the sun literally never shines and might be a location where we might find some ancient lunar ice. Thanks to Chuck Wood at the Lunar Picture of the Day for posting the link as well as posting a high resolution image from the movie (which I've taken the liberty to make my background on my laptop). When I first saw this image, I thought for sure it was some artwork! In fact, it reminded me some of a painting I did a few years ago that you can see at this link. Looking back on that painting, I don't think I made the shadows long enough....

Fire near Kitt Peak

2007-07-10T23:10:00.000-07:00

A fire was started last weekend most likely by lightning and has burned more than 5,000 acres south of Kitt Peak. It's been called the Alambre fire and has threatened the observatory. Luckily, and through the hard work of firefighters, the fire has not spread north to the observatory. Check out these excellent pictures by my friend Dave Harvey from last Sunday evening. Hopefully the wind will stay low and not blow the fire northward. It is in rugged terrain at the moment and if it got to the southern flank of Kitt Peak, it could easily overrun the observatory. I downloaded this image from Saturday afternoon off the Kitt Peak webcam website (see the view from the 4-meter telescope catwalk towards the south to see the latest images of the distant fire and smoke). This image looks absolutely frightening, but the fire is burning many miles south of the southern ridge of Kitt Peak where the telescopes you can see in this image are located. BTW, our Spacewatch Telescope domes are the two domes just above the 90 inch Bok telescope dome that looks like a spraypaint can in the lower right foreground.

Mars Global Surveyor

2006-11-21T18:53:00.000-07:00

Not quite yet ready to say "rest in peace," but the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft has not been heard from for over two weeks now. The most recent attempts were to image the spacecraft with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) which did not succeed. The next steps are to use the Mars Odyssey spacecraft to relay messages through the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity using the low gain antennas to see if it responds. Check out this space.com article for more details.

Shuttle Issues

2006-07-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

I know I'm going to sound grumpy again about the Shuttle. I watched the July 4th launch coverage live and have to admit that I cross more fingers now than I used to and only uncross some of them at SRB separation instead of all of them like I had in the past. Watching the ET cam is pretty cool, except that now you can see every small piece of foam fall off in real time that would have never been seen before. And of course, the news media focuses on each and every small bit of foam or minor tile damage that would not have been seen in the past until after landing. It's nice to have these new images, but the media in particular are clueless about the context of the new data. The shuttle, as far as foam shedding and tile damage is concerned is safer today than it ever has been. What I worry about now are all the things I worried about on STS-1 when Columbia went into orbit for the first time - we know now about the SRB O-rings and the foam shedding and tile damage (and both those issues have been addressed to the point that the problem is very much under control). What was obvious 25 years ago was how dangerous the main engines are and that was what I always had expected would take out the first orbiter. Hopefully with 17 more shuttle launches to go, we will have no further catastrophes and we can retire a remarkable but flawed vehicle and get on to the business of exploring our solar system.

For the latest on Discovery's current mission, check out this link.

Anniversary

2006-04-12T14:48:00.000-07:00

Today is a special anniversary. 45 years ago today, Yuri Gagarin launched into Space to become the first human to orbit Earth. 20 years later - 25 years ago today, John Young and Robert Crippen flew Space Shuttle Columbia on the first of its 28 flights into space during the first flight of the Space Shuttle program. While I was too young to remember Gagarin's flight, that flight spurred President Kennedy to challenge the United States to fly men to the Moon.

I remember clearly the day 25 years ago when Columbia launched. I had watched the roll out of Columbia the previous December and saw the two astronauts there next to the VAB at the Kennedy Space Center as Columbia crawled slowly out of the VAB on its way to Launch Complex 39A about 3 miles away. On April 12, 1981, I watched on a color TV with a camera set up to take stills and a tape recorder to record the launch. Having seen Saturn V launches on TV before, I wasn't sure what to expect of a Shuttle launch. It had been a long 6 years since the last launch of a United States manned spacecraft. With a delay in the launch two days earlier, I watched in great anticipation for this attempt. The Shuttle looked odd with the orbiter strapped to the side of a white painted external tank and a pair of solid rocket bosters flanking the sides of the tank. As the countdown reached T-7 seconds, I saw ignition of the main engines and a blast of yellow and blue flame spreading into a white exhaust plume as the count continued to zero. At zero, the SRBs lit and the shock of the brilliant SRB exhaust plume was stunning. Unlike the old Saturn V launches where the rocket took what seemed like forever to clear the tower and climb out, the shuttle did not dilly dally - it literally lept off the launch pad. I was very impressed. It was an exciting 8 minutes as we watched and then listened as the shuttle climbed into orbit. The next two days were fascinating and worrying. The shuttle had lost a couple tiles, but when it successfully landed at Edwards Air Force base on the dry lakebed two days later, we were reassured that the whole system worked almost flawlessly.

25 years later, we've watched more than 100 successful space shuttle flights doing some very remarkable things such as deploying satellites, retrieving and repairing satellites, docking with space stations and carrying out a lot of very interesting science experiments. Unfortunately, we've also watched in horror as two shuttle accidents took the lives of 14 brave astronauts. The shuttle has never quite lived up to the original billing of nearly weekly flights to orbit and cheap access to space. By the time its design was being turned into hardware, it is clear from this vantage point 25 years after its first flight that it could never achieve those goals. As the time for its retirement approaches, we can look back on the Shuttle's legacy and admire the machine despite its flaws and look forward to a future in spaceflight that will build on the Shuttle legacy and learn from both the successes and the failures.

First HiRISE images of Mars

2006-03-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been orbiting Mars for about a week and is about to begin its 6 month long aerobraking maneuver. Before starting that, it is taking its first test images with the powerful HiRISE camera. This image was taken from about 10 times higher altitude than the final science orbit will be but still produces a resolution of about 2.5 meters per pixel! This image should serve to whet our appetites (but probably not as much as the science teams is being whetted!) for what is to come when the spacecraft reaches its science orbit. Imagine resolutions better than 30cm per pixel! The camera will be taking a couple more images before the spacecraft begins its aerobraking maneuver in which it will dip into the thin upper atmosphere of Mars to use Mars atmosphere to slow the spacecraft slightly at the low point of each orbit, but not so deep into the atmosphere as to cause damage to the spacecraft. In this way, the high point of the MRO orbit around Mars will gradually decrease until it is in a nearly circular Martian orbit.

SMART-1

2006-03-23T14:42:00.000-07:00

The SMART-1 spacecraft has been orbiting the Moon and one of its experiements, the Advanced Moon micro-Imager Experiment (AMIE) has been returning some excellent images of our nearest neighbor. This image of Hadley Rille shows the area and the Apollo 15 landing site (which was near the place where the rille takes a sharp bend to the left just above the center of the mosaic of images). More details about the SMART-1 mission can be found at this website.

A great day for Mars exploration.

2006-03-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter successfully went into orbit around Mars after about a 7 month flight to the red planet. This orbit joins 3 other active orbiters at Mars along with two active rovers on the surface in the hunt for water and the history of water on Mars. The high resolution imaging camera, HiRise will be run at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and will produce the highest resolution images ever taken of any other planetary body with a resolution of about 15cm! HiRise will improve the resolution over Mars Global Surveyor about as far as MGS improved over Viking. Though the coverage of HiRise will be quite local and target specific rather than global, the data rates from the spacecraft will exceed all other spacecraft combined! MRO went into a very elliptical initial orbit after burning its 6 small thrusters for 27 minutes during Mars Orbit Insertion earlier today. It will spend the next 6 months using aerobraking to slowly circularize its orbit - every time it reaches periapse - the low point of its orbit, it will dip very slightly into the Martian atmosphere, slowing the spacecraft and lowering its apoapse a little. Eventually it will be in about a 180 mile circular orbit from which it can start doing its imaging science and then we'll start seeing some very spectacular closeup images of Mars.

Does the new planet affect your Astrological forecast?

2006-01-15T21:11:00.000-07:00

I posted these comments in my other blog

2nd anniversary on Mars

2006-01-03T15:22:00.000-07:00

The first Mars Rover, Spirit landing on the Planet Mars 2 years ago tommorow, on January 4, 2004. It was followed by its sister spacecraft, Opportunity, and it has been a wonderful two years of exploration on Mars. Spirit reached the summit of Husband Hill in the Columbia Hills a few kilometers from its landing site and is now descending into a valley east of the summit, on the other side of the hills from its landing site. Spirits path has been long and often rugged and the number of discoveries has been spectacular. Twice recently, Spirit has even observed lunar eclipses when it observed Phobos to enter into the shadow of Mars.

Opportunity sits halfway around Mars and is treking long and hard towards a crater called "Victory". It is busy examining exposed outcrops of sedimentary rock which tells the story of the history of Mars in Meridiani Planum.

Both rovers have been on Mars for more than one Martian year and have benefited from a few solar cell cleanings thanks to the Martian winds which will certainly extend the life of both rovers. They are showing their age, yet are still able to carry out exceptional workloads as they make tracks in the Martian dust. It will be interesting to see what the 2nd Martian Year will reveal.

Meteorites and lots of ice

2005-12-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered how they find meteorites in the Antarctic? Perhaps you heard about the Martian Meteorite they found a bunch of years ago? The annual ANSMET search team is on the ice and they have a blog to keep you up to date on their progress this season. Two of the team members this year have worked or still work at LPL at the UofA - look for mentions of Jani and Oz.

The Antarctic is a great place to find meteorites because the glaciers cover most of the rocks natural to the area. Meteorites land randomly on the face of the Earth, but in the Antarctic, they land on the ice and there are places that are especially good because the ice flows into areas and evaporates leaving a higher concentration of meteorites. And the meteorites they find there are preserved better than many other places on Earth thinks to the arid climate. The ANSMET team spends around 6 weeks out on the ice living and searching. They have to watch out for crevases as well as meteorites and hopefully will find the meteorite. Working in the Antarctic is probably a lot like it will be to live and work on the Moon and Mars in the future. You're far from home and living under relatively hostile conditions. Sounds like fun!

Apollo 17

2005-12-11T20:26:00.000-07:00

It was 33 years ago today that the Apollo 17 lunar module Challenger, piloted by mission commander Gene Cernan made the final lunar landing of the Apollo program. Challenger carried the first professional Geologist, Harrison "Jack" Schmitt to the surface of the Moon. Four hours after landing, Cernan and Schmitt climbed out of the LM to begin the first of 3 EVAs (ExtraVehicular Activity) outside their temporary home on the Moon.

I remember watching the mission with great interest, having the guidebook "On the Moon with Apollo 17" in hand and ready to watch the 7 hours of each of the 3 planned EVAs. Unfortunately, the TV networks did not carry the EVAs - walking on the Moon had become an event not worth full coverage. Challenger landed in the "Taurus-Littrow Valley", a mare like plain between massive mountains on the southwest margin of Mare Serenitatis. The site was chosen in part because of observations by the Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot Al Worden. He had observed dark halo craters in the valley during his flight which suggested the possibility of lunar volcanic activity. As it would turn out, the dark halo craters were simply impact craters which excavated a darker subsurface material laid down billions of years ago when the basin originally formed.

Apollo 17 set records for distance traveled on the Moon (thanks to the Lunar Roving Vehicle), weight of samples returned, EVA duration and lunar stay time. It's hard to believe it's been 33 years. I remember then thinking about Man's future in space that I would be too young to be the first person to set foot on Mars - the first Manned Mars landing was projected for 1986! We went so far in the 1960s and early 1970s. We are just now talking about taking longer strides and going back to the surface of the Moon and on to Mars.

The Fountains of Enceladus

2005-11-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

What a great set of images just down from the Cassini Spacecraft which shows plumes presumably of ice rising from the Saturn moon Enceladus. This meshes well with what I heard in a talk last month which included a discussion of Enceladus. All I can say is Cool! (pardon the pun).

Hayabusa shadow on Itokawa

2005-11-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

The Hayabusa spacecraft did a practice run where it descended to within 70 meters of the surface of asteroid Itokawa. Here is a picture from the ISAS website. In this image, you can see a shadow of the spacecraft on the rubbly surface of the asteroid. You can see the opposition affect making a bright halo around the shadow too, much as you might see around the shadow of the airplane you are riding in if you sit in the right part of the plane.

Hayabusa has a little rover called Minerva which will land on the asteroid soon. The latest reports show that it was successfully released this afternoon. The next few days ought to be very interesting as this mission continues to unfold.

Rubble Piles and Binary Asteroids

2005-11-03T05:36:00.000-07:00

Now this image is cool (click on it for a higher resolution version)! This the asteroid Itokawa which is currently being orbited by Japans Hyabusa spacecraft which will soon target a lander onto the asteroid. A few comments about this image. This asteroid looks like what I would expect a rubble pile to look like. It has blocks and boulders protruding from its surface like it just fell together. It's elongated like it might have been tidally distorted during a close approach to Earth. It looks like two discrete asteroids gently collided as though it might have been a binary at one time, perhaps only briefly before the two rubble piles gently collided, causing the smoother area near their joint.

Congratulations to the Hyabusa team and I'm looking forward to the success of the rest of your mission & a successful landing and sample return.

The Prometheus Effect

2005-10-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

The Cassini Spacecraft has taken high resolution images of the F-ring and have figured out how the small moon Prometheus causes the structure seen in the F-ring using a simple dynamical model. A paper is being published in the next issue of Nature if you want more details than you can find on the web.

I went to a talk yesterday about Enceladus and the rings of Saturn that was very interesting as well. The Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph on board Cassini has imaged a torus of molecular oxygen at the distance of Enceladus and after recent flyby's of Enceladus, have found that the south pole of the moon is warmer by 20 degrees than the equatorial region. Their hypothesis explaining their observations suggests that liquid water under a cracked surface on the younger south pole (compared to the cratered and obviously older surface elsewhere on the moon) is venting through the cracks with water perhaps mixed with ammonia that would be around 170 degrees Kelvin and liquid below the surface, would raise the temperature of the surface around the cracks to about 85K from about 65K as it cools to about 140K as it sputters Old Faithfull style into space, creating an atmosphere that escapes the moon and forms the oxygen torus as well as the water dissociates. The talk culminated in a discussion of the rings and it sounds like if the rings are regenerative, they could be much older than recent estimates, perhaps billions of years rather than only millions. They actually try to measure the ratio of icy ring material to contaminants from impacting meteoritic material as one estimate of age of the rings, but different ring models result in rather wide ranges of ages for the rings. Maybe they'll figure things out by the time Cassini's mission is complete. But in any case, it's really neat to see science and our knowledge of the Saturnian system growing by leaps and bounds as Cassini orbits the 2nd largest planet in our solar system. And another Titan flyby is on schedule shortly too!

HST images the Moon

2005-10-21T00:55:00.000-07:00

Jim Garvin recently used the HST to do some minerology on the Moon, looking at the distribution of resources there. HST imaged the Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 landing sites as well as the prominant crater Aristarchus, using the first two areas as ground truth since we have samples from those sites.

The HST has a resolution on the Moon of around 90 meters, so while the landing sites were imaged, the hardware remains unresolved (no groundbased telescope today can resolve the lunar hardware, though a set of 4 telescopes in the southern hemisphere are going to be used to do interferometry with a baseline of up to 200 meters and that might get to the resolution we'd need to marginally recognize the largest items left with the crude shape of those items starting to become recognizable. While we have no chance at seeing the Apollo artifacts in these images from HST, there is a lighter discolored area in just about the right spot on the highest resolution images in the set which might be caused by the lunar module descent engine scouring the surface during the final moments of landing almost 33 years ago.

BTW, if you bring up the large image of the Apollo 17 site, the top right image showing the rover and one of the two crewmembers on the rim of Shorty crater where they found orange soil can be seen in the left image and is at the dark spot in the light landslide material that extends out across the Taurus-Littrow valley that is left of the red "X" that marks the landing site.

Spaceref article on ESAS

2005-10-12T12:45:00.000-07:00

NASA has released some new details on the ESAS (Exploration Systems Architecture Study) which gives some diagrams of their current plans. While the CEV looks remarkably like the old Apollo Command Module (but on Steroids as some have suggested), and some seem to be poo-pooing the idea because it looks like a rehash of Apollo, I don't really see it as a problem. We know how well Apollo worked and it has some really great advantages. But we also see how we can improve the concepts of Apollo (for example a combination of Earth Orbit Rendezvous - EOR - and Lunar Orbit Rendezvous - LOR - is the prefered mode of travel to the Moon this time). By separating the crew and the payload as much as possible, the Crew launch vehicle (CLV) can be optimized for the task and be made as safe as possible. The Payload launch vehicle does not have to be manrated and can cary more cargo, particularly when combined with the CLV. The CEV is designed around launch vehicles and is worked backwards from what is expected to be needed to fly to Mars, so its ultimate version can carry 6 crew and earlier versions will carry 3 and 4 crewmembers. It can also be used in unmanned mode for carrying pressurized cargo to the ISS or can be replaced on the service module with a larger unpressurized cargo module. Very versatile.

The Lunar Module - this time called Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM) - is designed to use LOX & H2 in the descent stage and LOX/Methane in the ascent stage. Methane is thought to be readily available on Mars so that they can refill the tanks with local resources there. It also uses the same engine as the service module, so presumably, they can restock the SM tanks from in situ propellant resources.

Anyway, lots of neat plans and I think its very logical and very doable with the expected resources. Can't wait to see metal being bent on these designs!

Space Elevator

2005-09-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

Arthur C. Clarke has always been my favorite Sci-Fi author. I think it is because his stories are based on technically sound ideas using realistic concepts and he also tends to stick with relatively near-term stories that could well come to fruition. One of his stories is even one of my favorite Sci-Fi movies - 2001: A Space Odyssey. Given a slightly different political and economic environment, much of what he wrote about in that story could well have come to pass. Stories such as "Earthlight", "Prelude to Space", "A Fall of Moondust", or "Imperial Earth" gave me lots of ideas about what life might soon be like as we continued our expansion into space. One classic was "Rendezvous with Rama" which I remember reading as we traveled across country in 1976. One story I had trouble getting started on was "Fountains of Paradise". It started out slowly and the first time I started it, I put it down and couldn't get back into it. About a year later, I finally decided I was going to finish reading that book no matter what. It was the story of the building of the first Space Elevator. A Space Elevator is just that - a tall tower of sorts which allows one to use mechanical means rather than rockets to get out into space. But the materials needed to build such a contraption, at least in 1978 when he published that book, were only available in our imagination. Today, however, it might just be possible. If we could build a Space Elevator, we could climb into space for penny's on the dollar compared to using traditional rockets & we could use them to slingshot us to the planets as well. Arthur C. Clarke recently wrote a short article on Space Elevators. It's well worth a read.

Vandenberg Launch

2005-09-22T20:54:00.000-07:00

I was able to watch the Minotaur rocket launch out of Vandenberg which carried the military satellite called "Streak". From Tucson Arizona, we can see the rocket rise into the evening twilight sky despite it's being some 570 miles away. Murphy was definitely working against me tonight. First, I got a late start, then a schoolbus stopped me, then a traffic accident and finally, as I was pulling into an area far from where I wanted to end up, I saw the rocket rising into the sky behind some trees and bushes. I stopped at the end of the road and pulled my camera and tripod out and proceeded to take two pictures with my lens cap on - D'Oh! I didn't have time to carefully focus, so my first few images were not focused well and then when I put the zoom on and took a few more shots of the distorted lower plume, I discovered that there were some telephone wires in the way..... Sheesh, that Murphy is a devious character. Anyway, I put the images in my photoblog. Here are some thumbnails of them:

Global Warming - On Mars!

2005-09-21T21:53:00.000-07:00

New images from the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been orbiting Mars for the last 8+ years, have been collected showing the retreat of polar ice caps on Mars. That sounds like Global Warming to me, but humans are certainly not the cause in this case - it happens naturally on Mars. I know some congresscritter will claim it is George Bush's fault and some conspiracy kook will claim it's all NASA's fault for littering Mars with all those rovers and landers and orbiters....

Anyway, science at work again and there are lots of neat images on the web showing a fresh impact crater, fresh boulder tracks and fresh gullies on Mars - all of them were not there at some point in the recent past (when Viking orbited in the case of the crater and earlier in the MGS mission in the case of the other new features). Mars is obviously a very dynamic place as witnessed by these new images as well as by the images of dust devils we've seen from the Spirit rover on the summit of Husband Hill in Gusev crater. It will indeed be a very interesting place to explore for the first humans we land there. I can't wait to see what they find and what the other planned and flying robotic missions find.

Apollo Mk II

2005-09-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

NASA has announced details of its plans to land humans on the Moon by the end of the next decade. I think they have put together a very achievable plan and a good plan too. Unfortunately, I see a lot of the articles in the last day regarding the announcement making claims like "It's an Apollo retread" or one comment said: "It looks to me like the Alzheimer's program…for those that don't remember Apollo". The question I have for them is: What is so bad about how Apollo did things? Apollo was an excellent program which found one of the better ways to get men to the Moon. The new plans are an improvement on Apollo, not just a "retread". The lander is several times larger. The vehicle appears to have more margins for error and is much more robust towards future expansion and future exploration such as the planned Mars missions. NASA drew up these plans in light of what we learned from Apollo. Way to go!

At the summit

2005-09-02T13:56:00.000-07:00

While our attention has been diverted to more Earthly subjects like hurricanes, the Mars Exploration Rovers have continued to crawl around the Martian surface, revealing the geology, weather and history of that distant world. Here is one of the latest images from the Spirit rover which sits at the summit of a hill named after the commander of the ill fated Columbia STS-107 shuttle mission, Rick Husband. For more information on the latest from Spirit, check out the latest press release from JPL. At the summit of Husband Hill, they can see the entire region and have a great vantage point to watch dust devils (small mini-tornadoes) pass across the plains below. They can also see the rims of distant craters, and even the rim of Gusev, the large crater they landed in. The summit is covered with boulders and rock outcrops as well as small dunes of blown dust. It's almost like being there ourselves!

Delays, delays....

2005-08-19T10:12:00.000-07:00

NASA has announced that the next shuttle flight will not be until at least March 2006. While I can understand the reasons for putting off the next flight, I am also concerned that it reflects the timidness in our modern society. The no failure is acceptable attitude that pervades our country will keep us from greatness if left unchecked. Yes, the foam falling from the tank during STS-114 was not good, but at least we knew about it while that knowledge could actually do some good. The shuttle has some flaws, but if our plans for its retirement are to be carried out, it only has to fly about 15 or 20 more times, so a big expensive fix is just not a reasonable thing. With the extra launch imagery and the on orbit inspection and possibility of repair, we won't see another Columbia type accident. There are far more things to be worried about on the Shuttle - the SRBs have worked well since Challenger, but they are still quite dangerous. The main engines on the shuttle have worked nearly flawlessly, but are some of the most complex components on the shuttle and I cross my fingers for the 8 minutes they are burning on each flight. We've never had a return to launchsite abort and hopefully never well - I've heard that astronauts and mission contollers are uncertain that they would even work.

What we need is to get on with the shuttle program and go finish the ISS and retire the old shuttle fleet. We need to learn our lessons from the shuttle and factor those into the design and construction of its replacement and get on with human exploration of the solar system. It will be dangerous, but if we learn our lessons, we can make the best of it and go to the Moon and Mars much more safely than we might have without those lessons. Exploration is not for the timid and not for the foolhardy. There is a balance and we need to find that balance and get on with things. The Universe awaits us.

To Boldy Go Where No One has Gone Before....

2005-08-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

It has been interesting, but frustrating to watch the mission of STS-114 and to watch the reaction of the press and the public to the technical issues of this flight, the first shuttle flight since the Columbia accident. What is most frustrating is just how timid our nation has become about facing the dangers inherent in spaceflight. The attitude seems to be that no failure is acceptible. With this attitude, we would never have gotten to the Moon during Apollo. Despite how easy NASA has made spaceflight look, it is still very dangerous business. That is a tribute to NASA that they have done the business of spaceflight so well that it looks routine and to most, "boring".

As for the current mission, it is both a great enhancement and a heavy burden to see all of the extra imagery of the vehicle, both during launch and on orbit. During the first 113 missions of the Shuttle program, they would have no information about tile issues on the bottom of the orbiter and would not have detected the large bit of foam that fell off the external tank unless it hit the orbiter, so any engineering issues regarding such events would either not be addressed at all or would be discussed after the mission when the orbiter brought the evidence back with it in the form of damage to the tiles. Tile damage on the orbiter is a given. You've got the spacecraft mounted on the side of the launch vehicle where any bit of debris - foam, ice, bolts, whatever - that fall off of it risk impacting the spacecraft and its delicate thermal protection system. One thing we can learn for future spacecraft is to not only provide a continuously available abort system to get the crew away from a failing launch vehicle, but also, put the spacecraft on the front of the rocket where debris damage is much less likely.

So, while past missions suffered an AVERAGE of about 150 dings to the tiles, this mission, from the preliminary orbital inspection only had around 25 tile dings! That is a huge improvement! But while in the past, those dings and anomalies would not have been seen until the orbiter was on the ground, the engineers now see it in orbit and have to make a decision to repair or not during the approximately 2 week mission. We risk fixing a lot of things that are not going to bring the orbiter down like Columbia, for example the gap filler removed by EVA astronaut Robinson on Wednesday. We've seen this kind of anomaly before.

While there has been talk of scraping the shuttle right now instead of continuing its lame duck future and finishing the International Space Station with shuttle resources. We have more than 100 flights under our belt - we should be able to accept the risk and get on with the mission and finish the orbiter program. The new exploration program envisioned by NASA and supported by the current administration will not happen without risk. We must get back to business and accept that risk, for the future is worth that risk. Astronaut Gus Grissom, who died in the Apollo 1 spacecraft fire knew the risks he was taking and accepted them. He said, before the accident, that if he should die, he hoped the program would go forward despite that and Apollo did, as much because of his sacrafice. We learn, we get better and we go on, so its time to go on and keep flying the shuttle to its planned retirement.

Jim.

Deep Impact and Huygens on Titan....

2005-01-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

It's been a good week for science - Deep Impact successfully launched on its mission to impact comet Tempel 1 on July 4th this year and the Huygens probe successfully landed on Saturns moon Titan this morning.

Deep Impact will crash a 370 kg impactor into comet 9P/Tempel 1 on the 4th of July. The main spacecraft will observe the impact and the results and many groundbased telescopes will observe the comet before, during, and after the impact to see what happens to the comet. We really only have some well educated guesses about what the insides of a comet look like. We know what kinds of material comets give off from spectroscopic observations of comets comae and tails, but what fraction of comets are ice and what types of ice? Fred Whipple first proposed the "Dirty Snowball" theory of the makeup of a comets nucleus back in about 1950 and we've been refining that model ever since. It has done a great job of allowing us to explain the behavior of comets including the non-gravitational affects we've seen in comets. We've also seen some comets close up thanks to encounters with comet Halley in 1986 and more recently with the Stardust spacecrafts flyby of comet Wild 2. This time is certainly exciting to be interested in comets! BTW, be sure to grab your binoculars and go look at comet C/2004 Q2 (Machholz) before it gets too faint.

The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft appears to have had another great success today when the Huygens probe entered the atmosphere of Saturns moon Titan and descended on a parachute, continuing to send data back to Cassini for relay to Earth for about 2 hours before Cassini set below the horizen from the probes view on the surface of Titan. We await the download of all the probes data from Cassini in the next few hours and by the time the evening news is on in the U.S., perhaps pictures of Titans mysterious surface will be the lead story.

Jim.

Our Place

2004-12-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

Despite the humanocentric view of the Universe that most of humanities religions espouse, the Universe does not care about the existence of Humanity.

That humans exist at all is only the result of a long string of events. Changing nearly any of them would result in our not being here. The Universe is a very dangerous place. Earth could be devistated by an asteroid impact that would affect all life on the planet. A supernova could explode a little too close to Earth. Looking into the history of the Solar System, the passage of a star too close to the sun could have disrupted the orbits of the planets. Imagine if the asteroid or comet that impacted 65 million years ago and ended the reign of the dinosaurs had been perturbed by another asteroid 4 billion years earlier and instead of hitting Earth, passed harmlessly past Earth just outside of the atmosphere? What if a dinosaur species developed the intelligence and ability to build telescopes and spacecraft and had been able to deflect that asteroid or comet before it hit? In either case, the dinosaurs would likely still be walking the planet and the line of creatures that led to you and I might not have been able to thrive in the post-Cretaceous to result in the hominid line that includes us.

Imagine if Jupiter had not formed in the early Solar System. The amount of debris in the inner solar system would have remained significantly higher than it did - Jupiter literally cleared the planet crossing debris out of the early solar system and if it had not, the impact rate of asteroids and comets could be 10 or 100 times or more higher than it is today so instead of civilization threatening impacts happening a few times per million years and extinction level events happening every 100 million years or so, they might happen at rates that might prevent higher life forms from being able to easily develope and certainly too frequently for civilizations like ours to thrive for very long.

Well, we're here now. And provided we don't do something foolish to destroy our civilization, I am optimistic that humans will be able to overcome most threats, particularly the threat of civilization or extinction level impact events. Our present asteroid surveys are quickly finding those asteroids that are dangerous to life and civilization and if we should find an asteroid that will hit us at least a few decades from now or longer, I am convinced that we can devise a scheme to deflect that asteroid. While Earth has provided the birthplace of humanity, if we and our descendent species are to survive, we will have to become a spacefaring species, not only to protect ourselves from asteroids and comets, but also to provide insurance against the accidental destruction of ourselves or even by any of a billion potentially deadly events that can happen to Earth or in the vicinity of our solar system that could make Earth uninhabitable and end everything that humanity has become or might be.

Jim.

October 4

2004-10-04T11:21:00.000-07:00

It was 47 years ago today that Sputnik 1 launched (literally!) the first space age. It is quite appropriate that SpaceShipOne completed its requirements for winning the X Prize by flying a 2nd time in less than a week to an altitude higher than 100 kilometers. The first 47 years of the space age has seen satellites, manned spacecraft, robots on other planets and flying past all the planets but Pluto (and that is scheduled for a mission in the near future). Hopefully the next 47 years will see not only the exploration of our whole solar system but also spaceflight for the common Man and settlements on the Moon and Mars and beyond.

Congratulations to the folks who made SpaceShipOne so successful and to Peter Diamandis who launched the dream of the X-Prize!

Jim.

Anniversaries.

2004-10-04T09:06:00.002-07:00

Today is the 47th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. I find it fitting that SpaceShipOne completed its requirements for winning the $10M X-Prize by flying beyond 100km altitude twice in the space of a week with the payload of 3 passengers. Lets hope the next 47 years have many more spectacular achievements in space than the last 47 have - satellites, manned spacecraft, and landing on the Moon were the achievements of those first 47 years. Hopefully the next 47 will see human exploration of our whole solar system as well as settlements on the Moon and Mars and beyond.

Congratulations to the folks who made SpaceShipOne so successful and to Peter Diamandis who launched the dream of the X-Prize!

Jim.

Anniversaries.

2004-10-04T09:06:00.001-07:00

It's hard being a science geek while watching a movie.....

2004-09-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

I often have a hard time watching movies. Sure, I can still enjoy a movie, but my family gives me a hard time as they watch a movie with me. The other night, I watched the broadcast of the Tom Hanks movie "Cast Away". It was a good movie - really enjoyed it. But there is some bad physics, particularly in one scene. So Tom Hanks character is riding in a FedEx cargo plane which is running through some really bad weather and ultimately crashes (hence ultimately stranding Hanks character and his wonderful co-star "Wilson" the Volleyball on a desolate island). So Hanks character during the crash sequence, unbuckles himself from the jump seat in order to grab the pocketwatch his girlfriend gave him for x-mas and of course, the plane makes its crash landing in the ocean after he has unstrapped. So he grabs onto the cargo netting after one of the pilots gives him a raft, which he is holding on with his other hand. The plane hits the water and the water crashes through the cockpit and into the back of the plane and Hanks goes flying. Basic physics question: Which way should he go flying? In the movie, he goes flying into the back of the plane. Physics would have him go flying right into the front bulkhead - 200 knots to zero in a couple seconds at best is a lot of G's into the direction of motion. So there I am laughing at the TV, trying to watch the rest of the scene.... Ah, the life of a critical thinker....

I can't remember seeing any film that at least pretends to be based on reality that doesn't suffer from these kinds of continuity and science goofs. Whether it is the phase of the moon jumping around or being plain wrong or a coke can jumping from place to place as a scene plays out. Even footprints in the sand or Luke Skywalker climbing out of the trash bin (having been sucked below the watery muck) with perfectly groomed hair. I'm not the only one who watches for goofs in movies - check out the Internet Movie Database, search for your favorite movie and check the link called "goofs" under "fun stuff" on the left and you'll see a sample of the myriad of mistakes for that movie. You may never watch a movie the same way again..... Sorry.

Jim.

Fred L. Whipple

2004-08-31T09:12:00.000-07:00

A great man died yesterday at the grand old age of 97. Fred Lawrence Whipple was born in 1906. He joined the Harvard College Observatory (now the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory) and in the early 1930s, he became interested in meteors, working on determining the orbits of meteors, using multiple station photography using cameras outfited with a rotating shutter. Using parallax to measure the spacial location of a meteor imaged by two cameras several miles apart, and by measuring the rate of motion of the meteor by measuring the distance traveled between shutter interruptions in the trail, he was able to determine the location and velocity of meteors and thereby, their orbits. Prior to his work, other observers had found that a large number of meteors they had observed resulted in hyperbolic solar orbits. Whipple even modeled an extra-solar origin for some of these hyperbolic meteors. However, Whipple found that he needed to accurately time the appearance of the meteor for the orbit he got varied considerably from hyperbolic to elliptical depending on when during the long exposure that he assumed the meteor had appeared. Once he accurately timed the appearance of a number of meteors, he found that none of them were hyperbolic!

Whipple became interested in the physics of meteoroid ablation and atmospheric drag. This work led to a study of cometary nuclei which ultimately led to his revolutionary and still widely accepted "Icy Conglomerate" model of the comets nucleus - the so called "dirty snowball". His landmark paper in 1950 along with a paper by Jan Oort on the distribution of orbits of the long period comets in the same year completely changed our view of the comet complex and of the origin and evolution of the solar system.

Whipple had the foresight prior to the 1957 launch of Sputnik to set up a network of cameras that ultimately were used to track the first manmade Earth orbiting satellites. In 1972, "The Collected Contributions of Fred L. Whipple", a two volume collection of all of Whipples publications up to that point was published. These two volumes are each nearly 1000 pages long and are still an important collection, more than 70 years after the first of Whipples publications.

I have fond memories of meeting with Fred Whipple in about 1995. We chatted for perhaps an hour and he happily autographed my copy of the first volume of his Collected Contributions and also gave me an autographed stamp from the Republique Islamique de Mauritanie which honors him. We also talked at length about some of my work on comet photometry. We will miss Fred L. Whipple.

Jim.

Doomsday

2004-08-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

Doomsday is not upon us.....

Asteroid (4179) Toutatis will be making a very close approach to Earth in September. Toutatis is a Near-Earth Asteroid discovered in 1989 by Christian Pollas at Caussols in France on plates obtained by Alain Maury and Derral Mulholland. On September 29 of this year, it will pass just 1.550 million kilometers (963,000 miles) away from Earth - that's just 4 times the distance to the Moon - a close approach, but not an impact. Here's a couple websites which summarizes what we know about Toutatis:

http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/4179_Toutatis/toutatis.html

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_040503.html

http://www.astrosurf.com/maury/asteroides/toutatis.html

http://www.space-graphics.com/asteroid_toutatis.htm

http://www.arksky.org/toutatis.htm

Of course, there are some rumors of doomsday with claims that this asteroid is going to actually hit Earth instead of fly harmlessly past. Here's a sample of webpages about those rumors:

http://www.rense.com/general54/whyIfear.htm

http://www.cyber-north.com/ufo/toutatis.html

http://www.gaiaguys.net/Toutatis.htm

http://www.theyalltoldthetruth.com/

If Toutatis were to hit Earth, and it might someday (but don't worry, it won't anytime in the predictable future - at least a few hundred years...), it would do a great deal of damage. The object is about 2.4 by 4.6 kilometers in diameter. It would cause a crater around 40 kilometers in diameter (the size of a medium to large city) and throw enough debris into the atmosphere to likely cause a small nuclear winter type event or at least affect the climate on Earth for a few years. It would devistate an area the size of a state and if it impacted in an ocean, it would cause tsunami along the shores of that ocean. But humananity would survive the impact - Toutatis is not large enough to cause a mass extinction event, though it would kill a great many if it were to hit.

In any case, Toutatis poses no immediate danger despite the cries of a few kooks and crackpots who claim otherwise..... On the other hand, this close approach gives a wonderful opportunity for those with small telescopes to see an asteroid visually. I had the opportunity to view an asteroid I discovered in 1991 when I spent an evening using a 16 inch telescope. I was prepared with finding charts of the area the asteroid would be passing through. It was moving about an arcsecond every couple seconds and was about 12th magnitude. As we centered up the telescope on the field, my eye was drawn to one star in particular - it wasn't moving fast enough to be obviously moving, but it would shift enough to be obvious compared to the stars around it after a few moments and the subtle motion was enough for my eye and brain to pick it out. Toutatis will be about 9th magnitude at its brightest as it zips across the sky. At its brightest it will be best viewed from the southern hemisphere, but before that when it's brighter than 12th magnitude, it will be visible to anyone with a telescope and some advanced preparation.

Jim.

Anniversaries

2004-07-16T20:55:00.000-07:00

I know where I was 10 years ago today, without even trying to think about it. You see, my good friend David Levy along with one of the nicest ladies on the planet and her husband, a man who was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, discovered the shattered remains of a comet near the planet Jupiter 10 years and 16 months ago which the world knew as comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. I was in the right place at the right time when David called me from Mt. Palomar to help them confirm their new discovery on the night of March 26, 1993. It was one of the most exciting moments of my career, right up there with the discovery of my own comets and the announcement that one of my own discoveries might make a close approach to Earth 30 years later (which you might recognize as 1997 XF11) when I became the first person in the Universe to see their new comet for what it was as a string of broken pieces of comet (their faint fuzzy images only hinted at what I was able to see with my CCD camera on a telescope with about four times the light gathering power). So, 16 exciting months after their discovery, following meetings with colleagues who, along with me, were planning to try and observe and study the comets demise, the 21+ fragments plummeted into Jupiter over about 6 days in July 1994, beginning with the first fragment on July 16. I traveled to the Wise Observatory in the desert of Isreal where we were going to try to observe the affects of the first impact, of fragment "A". Jupiter was not very well placed in the western sky following sunset and the Moon approached Jupiter closely, but the longitude where the Wise Observatory is located was at the right place on planet Earth to be in the dark while Jupiter was still high enough to observe in the sky. I was part of a network of observers spread around the globe to try and observe as many of the impacts as possible. And that is why I remember where I was 10 years ago today.

It does not seem possible that it has been 10 years already. It is also hard to believe that it has been 7 years since one of the discoverers, Gene Shoemaker, was killed tragically in a car accident while studying impact craters in Australia. But this Geologist turned Astronomer lead a wonderful life, taking up the science of Geology as a young boy and turning his eyes towards the moon. If everything had worked his way, he might have been the first geologist to walk the Moon, but instead, it was one of his protoge's who took that honor, but after his death, he became the first to have his remains left on the moon when some of his ashes flew aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft which was deliberately crashed onto the moon at the end of its mission to map the minerology of the Moon. Gene Shoemaker studied Meteor Crater in northern Arizona and definitively proved that it was the result of the impact of a small asteroid. He later founded the Astrogeology branch of the United States Geological Society in Flagstaff Arizona and lead the first U.S. spacecraft to softland on the Moon during the Surveyor program as well as leading the geological investigation of the Moon during Apollo. After Apollo, he turned his eyes and brain towards the stars, realizing that the pulverized cratered surface of the Moon continues to be pounded, and he knew just what to do to learn first hand about the objects that continued to pound the Moon. Shoemaker and a few farsighted colleagues invented another field of research, the Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) field by designing one of several innovative survey programs which pioneered the field of NEA discovery. It was as part of his survey that Gene and his wife Carolyn and David Levy stumbled upon one of the most momentous moments in history with their discovery of Shoemaker-Levy 9.

I find it even more interesting that the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 occured on the 25th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11 - the first manned landing on another world and an event that Shoemaker himself was heavily involved in. The first impact on July 16 marked the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 11 Saturn V and today, I remember not only the wonderous impacts of S-L 9 on Jupiter 10 years ago, but the flight of the first men to walk on the moon 35 years ago, an event that inspired this then future scientist to learn more about the Moon, planets, stars and Universe.

Jim.

Cassini

2004-07-01T12:15:00.000-07:00

The Cassini spacecraft successfully made it into orbit around Saturn last night. It had to successfully pass through the ring plane of Saturn twice and fire its rocket engine for 96 minutes to change its velocity by 626 meters per second (about 1,400 miles per hour). I watched NASA TV during the event and waited along with more than a dozen friends and colleagues who have invested as many as 15 years working on Cassini. Each hurdle passed with the cheers of the folks on TV at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) control center as we watched the Doppler velocity graph change as they tracked the spacecraft during its close approach to the planet and its rocket engine burn. After its engine shut down right on time, the largest cheers were heard. In the meantime, out at Saturn, the spacecraft turned its high gain antenna towards Earth to improve communication and then turned its powerful cameras onto the rings of Saturn as it made its closest and best approach of the entire 4 year orbital mission to the rings. This morning, it beamed its images back home and we've seen some of the fantastic images on the web and in the news. It is just the beginning of 4 wonderful years of discovery around the Solar System's 2nd largest planet.

Next up: a close flyby of Titan, the 2nd largest moon in the Solar System and the equivalent of your grandmothers freezer where she kept those Apple pies frozen and awaiting your visit, in this case, a frozen snapshot of planet formation in the early solar system. Titan is hidden by a thick cloud cover that keeps us from easily seeing the surface. In December, Cassini will release the Huygens probe which will enter the atmosphere of Titan on January 14 and parachute through its atmosphere taking measurements and images all the way to the surface. Will it land on solid ground or will it land in an ocean of methane? Some of my friends designed and built the camera that will show us.

Jim.

Of Venus and Iridium flares...

2004-06-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

It's always pretty cool how fast Venus goes from the evening sky to the morning sky during it's Inferior conjunction (when it is passing close to the Sun while on the same side of the Sun as Earth is - Superior conjuction is the opposite, when it is on the other side of the Sun). Remember just a couple weeks ago it was transiting the disk of the sun. Already it is far out from the Sun and easily visible in the morning sky. It should be able to be seen in the daytime again soon too. When it's near its maximum elongation, it is not too hard to pick out in broad daylight or at least just after sunrise or before sunset (depending on which side of the sun it is on). My friend Dan and I used to stop next to the building we worked in on our way back from lunch and try and see it when it was on the evening side of the Sun. Blocking the bright sun using the building cut the glare enough to make it a bit easier. We succeeded as often as not and it was always fun to see who would find it first. It helped to have a fresh set of glasses with the best prescription to make Venus as sharp as possible....

Have you ever seen an Iridium flare? Iridium satellites were launched a number of years ago as a global telephone communication network that went bankrupt (those dang cell phones took over that market!). The spacecraft are kept precisely oriented so that the highly reflective antennae they have on them that act like mirrors reflecting the suns image and the direction of those reflections can be predicted pretty accurately. When you are in just the right path on the ground, you can see the suns reflection off those panels (the closer you are to that path on the ground, the brighter the flare appears). Last night, I was getting ready to observe on Kitt Peak when I watched a flare predicted to be magnitude -8. That's about 25 times brighter than Venus appears in when it is at its brightest. I saw the satellite approach the predicted location as it slowly brightened and for about a second or two, it was really impressively bright. To see when the next Iridium flare is visible from your location, check out the Heavens Above webpage. Just select your location and click on the link to get Iridium flare predictions for the enxt 24 hours or 7 days (or if you think you saw one last night, there's a link for that too). You can enter your location more precisely if you know it (for example, if you have GPS unit and can measure your latitude and longitude). Iridium flare predictions are pretty location specific, so if you can enter a more precise observing location, you will get a better prediction. When you get a page of predictions, they will list the date and local time (set your watch to WWV if you can!), the Intensity (the smaller the number - i.e. the more negative the number - the brighter it will appear. Venus at its brightest is about magnitude -4.5), the Altitude (how high up in the sky it appears with 45 degrees halfway up, and 90 degrees straight over head) and the Azimuth (0 degrees is due north, 90 degrees due east, 180 degrees due south and 270 due west), the distance you would need to move to put yourself along the path of the flare center where the flare would be at its brightest, the Intensity at the flare center and finally which of the Iridium satellites is involved.

To come full circle with Venus (remember I mentioned you can see it in the daytime if you know where to look), the brightest Iridium flares can also be seen in the daytime! The observation is difficult and you need to not only be able to know where to look but to know when to look. The predictions tell you that the flare will occure at some altitude and azimuth from your site and it is very difficult to estimate just where 57 degrees altitude and 84 degrees azimuth is up in the sky without any other sorts of reference points. If you are patient and wait for a daytime flare that is at almost 90 degrees altitude, that is straight overhead and is probably the easiest place on the sky to find in the daytime. And with the sky a bright blue, even a -8 flare is not terribly easy to see, but if you manage it, it is quite a satisfying observation! Start with some night-time flares first, though!

Jim.

A great week in Space

2004-06-26T21:09:00.000-07:00

Did you notice the excellent events in Space this week?

Early on Monday morning SpaceshipOne rocketed to above 100 kilometers altitude, making it the first privately flown manned spaceflight.

Meanwhile out near Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft is nearing its target, flying past its first Saturnian satellites as it prepares for the Saturn Orbit Insertion maneuver on June 30 (now less than a week away!). A lot of my friends are crossing their fingers that the 96 minute rocket engine burn will go off without a hitch and the spacecraft will drop into orbit to begin an exciting mission to unlock the secrets of the 2nd largest planet in our solar system. Early results from the flyby of the Saturnian moon Phoebe suggests that this moon originated in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune. If this is confirmed, it is the 2nd closeup look at what one of those distant objects is like - Voyager 2 flew past Neptune back in 1989 and got a closeup look at Triton which may well have originated there as well and is very similar in size and distance from the Sun as Pluto.

On Mars, a couple of hardy little robots are expanding our knowledge of the red planet with new discoveries daily. At the base of the Columbia Hills, the Spirit rover discovered Hematite in an unusual looking rock nicknamed appropriately The Pot of Gold. Meanwhile, halfway around the planet, Opportunity has been carefully creeping farther down into the Endurance crater, studying the rock outcrops there.

Back on Earth, it still seems like forever since we last saw a Space Shuttle launch, but NASA has just announced a reorganization that hopefully will help it to achieve the lofty Space Exploration Initiative goals.

This is my first blog - I'm planning to focus my posts here on Space mostly, since I'm a regular Space Nerd. My interest in science grew out of watching the Apollo Astronauts explore the moon when I was a child, so the nickname I'm using is appropriately "ApolloGeek" since I love to study every tiny detail of the Apollo space program and look forward to the day that we again have humans walking on the Moons surface and kicking the rust colored soil of Mars as well.

Jim.