I just discovered an outstanding astronomy and space web site called "Windows to the Universe." It has great reference materials, graphics, audio & video clips, and even games. I tried playing the Space Sense quiz game on the "hard" setting and crashed from 82 km - so close to 100 km! I didn't know that Neptune's winds are the fastest in the solar system, around 2000 km/hour (I picked Jupiter - doh!).
In 2007 I wrote a couple of times (here and here) about a science fiction novel called Coyote which involves the exploration and colonization of an Earth-like moon orbiting a Saturn-like planet in a solar system 46 light years from Earth. I connected this to the then-recent discovery of a gas-giant exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star, and I commented, "Of course no moons have been detected yet, but all the gas giants of our solar system have them, and it's reasonable to assume that extrasolar gas giants would as well."
Dust by the Benjy Davis Project - I had never heard of this Louisiana band, but last week I was looking through free MP3's at Amazon.com when I noticed a whole free album that had a 4+ star average rating. I sampled a few songs and downloaded it. I've been listening in the car, and it's great! I especially love the song "Sweet Southern Moon" but it's all good. Why is it free? Just promo I guess - usually bands release one or a few free songs, but this is a 13 song album from late 2008. Get it!
LeftRightLeftRightLeft by Coldplay - I love about a third of Coldplay's music, and the rest is just OK for me, but that's just me - obviously they're an amazing band. A free live album? Yup - "here's a thank you to our fans" - nine songs from the current tour. Wonderful stuff, and now I want to see them (so mission accomplished, guys).
NASA announced the results of a contest to name the Mars Science Laboratory rover - its name will be Curiosity. Clara Ma, a sixth grade student in Kansas, submitted the winning entry (you can read her brief essay explaining why she chose this name).
Carnival of Space #104 is up. The Carnival is hosted by Mang's Bat Page. I counted 31 posts on a wide range of topics.
I just read a cool interview with Jeff Hoffman that Nancy Atkinson did a few days back on Universe Today. Dr. Hoffman was one of the mission specialists on the first Hubble Servicing Mission in 1993 (STS-61). He actually installed the WFPC2 camera that just came back to Earth with the STS-125 crew.
Bad weather in Florida required Atlantis to land at Edwards AFB, California, and they made a beautiful landing there this morning at 8:39 a.m. PDT.
I love this other picture that I found on the STS-125 gallery site, showing shuttle pilot Gregory Johnson practicing for the landing with a simulator on the flight deck of Atlantis. Here's what it says there: S125-E-013050 (21 May 2009) --- Occupying the commander's station, astronaut Gregory C. Johnson, STS-125 pilot, uses the Portable In-Flight Landing Operations Trainer (PILOT) on the flight deck of the Earth-orbiting Space Shuttle Atlantis. PILOT consists of a laptop computer and a joystick system, which helps to maintain a high level of proficiency for the end-of-mission approach and landing tasks required to bring the shuttle safely back to Earth.Just like Orbiter on my laptop (almost)! Except Orbiter has better graphics.
I missed this PBS special when it was broadcast earlier this year, but tonight I got to see "400 Years of the Telescope" at my astronomy club meeting (yes, I do live an exciting life). Narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the one-hour special does a good job tracing the history of telescope technology and its application to astronomy, from Galileo to Hubble (man and telescope) to the next generation of really huge ground-based telescopes now under development. Good stuff for general audiences, with enough "behind the scenes" views and interview segments with astronomers to make it interesting for people like me who already know most of this stuff.
The June issue of Discover Magazine has an interesting article on the Russian Фобос-грунт (Phobos-Grunt, "Phobos-soil") mission which is currently planned to launch in October 2009 (there is some indication that it could slip to the 2011 Mars launch window instead). This mission will land a probe on the larger of Mars' two small moons, Phobos, pick up a small "soil" sample, and return it to Earth. The article by James Oberg is called "Stepping Stone to Mars" and is now available online.
The Phobos-Grunt mission will also carry a special experiment from the Planetary Society. It's called LIFE (Living Interplanetary Life Experiment), and it will send a small collection of hearty Earth microbes sealed inside a tiny canister to see how well these simple life forms are able to survive the conditions of interplanetary space over some 34 months. The canister will be attached to the soil return module so it can be studied back here on Earth. This will provide a test of some aspects of the "panspermia" theory (life possibly traveling between planets embedded within meteors) by showing whether or not these organisms can survive these conditions. We know that bacteria can survive in the most severe conditions on Earth, and we have experience with relatively short near-Earth space exposures during which many bacteria have done just fine. Strep and perhaps other bacteria survived 31 months on the Moon inside parts of the Surveyor 3 spacecraft which Apollo 12 astronauts returned to Earth.
I released my first "single" from my upcoming album, a song called "Gonna Start Winning" (Amazon MP3). I recorded this song in 2003 (this new album project has been going on for a while). It's a sort of country/rock boogie tune with slide guitar work by Roger Lavallee and piano by Steve Mossberg. The picture refers to the first line of the song, "When a fortune-cookie fortune blew my way, I could tell today was gonna be OK." I notice I use the word "gonna" a lot, mainly in songs.
As the crew of Atlantis prepares to come back to Earth tomorrow following their successful Hubble Servicing Mission (weather permitting), I received an email from JPL inviting me to register for a Hubble Educator Conference to be held at JPL the weekend of May 30-31. Unfortunately I can't make it, but the email also reminded me of what a "spacey" month May is turning out to be:
I'm starting to do serious recording to finish up a new album I'm planning to release later this year. It's probably going to be called "Message from Tomorrow," and that's the song I recorded yesterday with my amazing producer, Roger Lavallee (the song was written with my friend Rob Simbeck in 2006). I walked into the Tremolo Lounge with a simple acoustic demo at 10:30 am and in less than six hours, Roger and I (mostly Roger!) turned it into what I think is a really cool pop-rock recording.
Although they still need to re-deploy Hubble to orbit on Tuesday, the STS-125 astronauts performed the fifth and final EVA today, and completed all the planned upgrades for the telescope. I was busy today moving my daughter home from school, so I didn't get to follow any of the final EVA, but the summary I read on SPACE.COM indicates that it went extremely well. As an optical engineer as well as a space and astronomy enthusiast, I'm especially happy to know that the world's best-known and most-loved optical system is ready to take on the universe for another five years or more.
What do the following things have in common?
STS-125 astronauts Mike Massimino and Mike Good are just leaving the airlock to start the fourth EVA of the ongoing Hubble servicing mission. The Atlantis astronauts are doing amazing work on this mission. EVA's one and two were pretty tough - they accomplished their tasks, but they ran into problems that caused the EVA's to run long. Yesterday's third EVA was expected to be even tougher, with the unprecedented on-orbit circuit board replacement repair of the ACS camera considered a long shot for success. But astronauts Grunsfeld and Feustel accomplished all phases of this repair in about three hours of the six and a half hour space walk.
Though I'm trying to save trees by buying most of my reading material in electronic form these days, I still have a thing for books, especially good books that are really cheap, like the $4.99 hardcover copy of The Planets by Dava Sobel that I found in a bookstore last week. I've known about this 2005 book for some time, but I thought of it as something of a collection of anecdotes that I'm probably familiar with anyway, so I never bothered to read it.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a cool spacecraft, and the STS-125 astronauts are busy working on making it better than ever. Despite difficulties with some bolts, yesterday's EVA team removed the workhorse WFPC2 and replaced it with the new WFC3 camera system. Today the second EVA team has replaced RSU's (Rate Sensor Units, part of the telescope's attitude sensing system) and is now working on replacing batteries.
Both satellites will operate quite far from Earth, at the Sun/Earth L2 Lagrangian point. They will be established in separate Lissoujous orbits around the L2 point. If you would like to see what this looks like for yourself, you can do so in Orbiter, courtesy of Brian Jones and Papyref, whose latest add-on simulates the Herschel and Planck spacecraft and also provides a special tool for viewing their orbits around the L2 point (screen shot at top). The models and included materials for this add-on are quite detailed. There is one L2 scenario provided, plus two launch-related scenarios (these require additional add-ons for the Ariane 5 launch vehicle and the ESA Kourou launch site.
Hubble images are all over the web, but here's an especially nice page I found at the ESA Hubble site. Click on one of the top-100 thumbnails, and you get a descriptive page for that image, with links to download it in many sizes. Cool. There's also an ESA SM4 blog following the mission in great detail.
I've got another IYA podcast coming up on June 4. It's called "JPL's Greatest Hits" and I completed it over the weekend. It's more or less a DJ-style top-10 list of what I consider to be JPL's greatest space exploration missions from 1958 to today. It was tough to settle on just ten, but that's what a top-10 list is all about. Of course it's just my opinion in any case.
The STS-125 mission to the Hubble Space Telescope continues to go well. I followed parts of the final approach, line up, and grappling steps on NASA TV the afternoon. You could see how detailed planning and practice pays off in smoothness and precision. Atlantis was maneuvered to exactly the right orientation with respect to HST, with the telescope centered just 30 meters or so above the payload bay, and the long axes of the telescope and shuttle perpendicular. Then the commander used vertical thrusters to smoothly rise until the pre-positioned RMS arm was nearly lined up with the HST's grappling fixture, where relative motion between the two spacecraft was frozen (something like the simulated Orbiter view above).
Mission specialist Megan McArthur then made short work of grabbing the fixture (nearly final end-effector camera view from NASA TV above), moving the RMS's end effector essentially straight forward by what appeared to be a meter or so. I had to go to a meeting and missed the berthing step, but when I came back, they were just withdrawing the RMS. Now they are all set to start working on the telescope (view of HST solar panel below).
If you want some deep background information on the Hubble Space Telescope and this week's SM4 service mission, you can download a 133 page Media Reference Guide for the mission here (PDF). This guide was produced for NASA by Lockheed Martin, and it includes: Introduction, HST Servicing Mission 4, HST Science and Discoveries, Science Instruments, HST Systems, and HST Operations. It has a lot of colorful and informative graphics, including a number of still shots from photorealistic NASA animations of service mission operations (two of them shown here, on page 2 of the guide).
The Spacewriter's Ramblings presents the one hundred and second Carnival of Space in the unusual format of a five-ring circus. Check it out!
My Orbiter skills are a bit rusty, and after what I thought was an on-time launch of Atlantis (simulating this afternoon's real launch tonight), I had a pretty substantial misalignment between my orbital plane and that of the Hubble. I played around with the plane alignment tool, but I was impatient and I made things worse. Time to review chapter 5 of Go Play In Space on rendezvous and docking (which I wrote, but that doesn't mean I can remember everything - it takes practice to maintain any complex skill). But not tonight!
I've got NASA TV playing in the background, and it looks like a beautiful day to launch Atlantis at KSC. The countdown seems to be going well, and the long-delayed final Hubble service mission should be underway soon.
It's funny how things work sometimes. I forgot that I was supposed to bring a guitar to a family get-together in Keene, NH today (hey, I thought it was a yard work "party"). A few blocks from the destination, I noticed that "Retro Music" (I store I had driven by dozens of times) was not a used CD store, but a used musical instrument store. After we unloaded the car, I headed over there "just to check it out." What a cool store! They have a great selection of guitars and really good prices (Keene is a college town, among other things, so maybe this is why there's a store like this in such a small place).
It's not gone yet, but with the final Hubble service mission (STS-125) set to launch on Monday, WFPC2 will soon be replaced by the new WFC3 instrument. WFPC2 was built by JPL as a backup for the original WF/PC (Wide Field and Planetary Camera) that was installed in HST when it launched in 1990. When the error in HST's primary mirror was discovered, WFPC2 was already in construction, and it was quickly realized that relatively minor optical adjustments could be built into it to correct for the primary mirror's aberration without using the auxiliary correction optics (COSTAR) that would be needed for Hubble's remaining on-board instruments.
NASA has used Microsoft's Photosynth technology to create interactive "3D" image collections that allow you to explore the ISS (inside and out) and JPL's new MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) rover. This technique essentially maps a large set of photos from multiple views onto a sort of 3D "frame" and provides you with a graphical browser that allows you easily and (fairly) smoothly transition between the different views.
There's a cool preview of the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) mission today on the Planetary Society Blog, written by guest blogger Jim Bell of Cornell University, a participating scientist on the LRO mission. The launch window for LRO opens on June 2.
Since it was not really that crowded, I was actually able to see just about everything I wanted to see, with the exception of a couple of movies that had long lines. I saw models, sample hardware, pictures, and video from various past and future missions (Galileo, Dawn [ion engine shown here], Spitzer, Kepler, GRAIL, Phoenix, Cassini, Mars Pathfinder, Explorer 1, and more, in no particular order). I got to talk with JPL personnel on several current and future missions, including several MER Rover drivers, as well as Dr. Fuk Li, Manager of Mars Exploration Programs, a really interesting and nice guy. I also saw a number of research and development robots.
But the main event for me was the four hours I spent hanging out in the Mars Exploration Program area, answering visitors' questions about Mars and especially about the MER Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. I and the other volunteers were helped in this by "Bubba," the MER Full-Scale Mobility Test Vehicle. Bubba was rolling around my end of the Mars Program tent under the control of software on a notebook computer which was in turn controlled by several actual Rover Drivers from MER Operations. In spite of this control system, Bubba would sometimes "sneak up on me" as I was talking with some visitors - someone would say "moving rover behind you," and I would be surprised to see it back there. I think having this moving rover coming close to the fence was a major part of the appeal. The other cool thing was the way it could climb over a rather large "Mars rock" placed in front of its wheels.
Doing this was really fun, and having a life-size, realistic-looking, and moving Mars Rover was an even better "prop" than Orbiter for engaging people about "space stuff." I think I need to get me one. Or at least come back next year and do it again at JPL.
The latest Carnival of Space is hosted this week by David Portree's Robot Explorer blog. It's an excellent collection of posts - check it out.
