The Newsletter of
the Seattle Chapter
of
The National Space Society
»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»» May 1999 «««««««««««««««««««««
The National Space Society is an international
membership group
dedicated to furthering the exploration and development of space.
The Seattle
chapter mission is to facilitate Space Activism and all pro-Space
activities; and to provide
a gathering place for space enthusiasts to meet, exchange
information and ideas.
President:
Vince Creisler
vincelc@galaxy-7.net
Vice President: Chris Vancil
CLVANCIL@aol.com
Secretary/Editor:
Randy Rumley
rjrumley@juno.com
Treasurer:
David Stuart
DSTUART@prodigy.net
Special Projects Manager:
Christopher Erickson aster@wolfenet.com
----------Board of Directors---------
Kelly Caviezel Gary Harrison Christopher Erickson
Susan Harrison Toni Rusi
------------Advisors------------
Terry Burlison
Chapter meetings are held at 7:00 PM on the second Saturday of each month, at the
Museum of Flight; parking is available in the lot North of the museum. To receive
information regarding upcoming events please send your name and addresses
to: Randy Rumley; 12008 S.E. 223rd Drive Kent, WA 98031
XXX
so·journ(sò jûrn), to stay for a time in a place; live temporarily.
President's Message
The recent spate of launch failures, reminiscent of the series of launch failures following the Challenger disaster in 1986, shows that forty-two years into the Space Age, consistent reliable access to space still eludes mankind. Will reliable, airliner like access to space ever arrive?
Modern airliner technology was pioneered by government bomber and military transport programs to develop reliable, maintainable high performance machines. Some designs, such as the B-52 and KC-135, still fly missions today. Modern rocket technology was pioneered by government missile programs to hurl warheads on one-way trips lasting only minutes. Highly integrated, close-to-margin, extreme performance vehicles may make fine weapons, but adapting them into practical commercial transportation, where economy and reliability are paramount, seems futile. The Space Shuttle program blended missile and aircraft technology with unsatisfactory results, to say the least.
Humanity will never tap the full commercial potential of Space on the backs of these contraptions, much less colonize there. It's time for a clean sheet of paper and committed effort to develop a new generation of launch vehicles. Those who think that industry alone can do this, "unfettered by government interference," forget the lessons of history. America's Freeway system, railways, airports and shipping ports are examples of government investment--imagine trying to conduct commerce today without them. Advanced transportation technologies from tall sailing ships to jet aircraft were pioneered with government investment, admittedly for military purpose, to the ultimate benefit of commerce.
We approach the next millennium with our economy thriving, and enemies at bay--when could there be a better time to invest our good fortune in providing future generations with the key to the stars?
Vince Creisler
April 10, 1999 Meeting
Our Speaker was Chris Vancil, our Vice President. He gave us a talk that he had prepared on the Science of Space Art. Discussion covered how an artist creates the pictures of the future that are interesting, accurate, or simply breathtaking. He brought space art books and discussed various styles of artwork. He also showed some of his own work.
After Chris finished, we also discussed how things went at Norwescon this year and other activities. We also put out a blanket request for people who are interested in becoming active in the Seattle Chapter. Our President has announced that he will not be available for the office next year, so we are searching for someone to fill his shoes. A candidate with a vision for the future of the chapter and ideas for expansion of activities would be most appreciated.
Randy J. Rumley
(Ed.)
May 8, 1999 Meeting
Brian Tillotson will be talking about Space Manufacturing techniques. Brian is a Boeing scientist who's worked on various projects. These include: learning by autonomous mobile robots, automatic target recognition, planetary surface systems including robotics, energy storage, and heat rejection, tethers for propulsion and artificial gravity, solar power satellite studies, automation and robotics for protein crystal growth in microgravity, various applications of diamagnetic forces in reduced gravity, including a current NASA contract to separate air from water using the magnetic force on water.
He is currently assigned to Airborne Surveillance Testbed and a couple of small NASA research contracts, too.
As always, we will continue discussion of various space-related subjects until we are kicked out of the room.
We will also have our 'Let's go to the new world' T-shirts available, and The Mars Society Puget Sound Chapter will have a couple of interesting books on Mars available for sale.
Ed.
Norwescon activities April 1 - 4
As always at these events, no battle plan survives contact with the Science Fiction crowd. Chris Vancil and myself were on a couple of panels that went well (one on launch vehicles of the future, and one on Commercialization of NASA). These were on Friday, so we had time to see other panels Saturday.
There were a couple of JPL/NASA folks doing panels also. N. Talbot Brady (a mission programmer) gave discussion on Galileo and was on the future space vehicles panel. Due to a lack of speaker, he was able to talk about Galileo and other spacecraft he has worked on for a full two hours (and he could have gone longer). Also Bridget Landry (a mission scheduler) of Pathfinder fame went over the pathfinder mission including discussion of how it came about in the first place (it was supposed to be a demonstrator for a multitude of similar craft which would land all over Mars). She also was a snappy dresser. For her talk on Pathfinder she was dressed in Martian camouflage. She later was dressed as a vampire in pink.
Due to rescheduling of Cy Varnum's Rover speech, our open meeting sort of fizzled. Instead we prepared for the room party. This went well, even though the hotel screwed up on placing party rooms in the wrong places. There was some heated discussion on launch vehicles, NASA operations, and future missions. We also ate a lot of vegetables (mostly carrots it seems), and had some space videos playing in the background. We usually had a full room. Discussion went till around 2:30AM (or 1:30 on standard time).
We did well at the table, thanks in part to John Schlick and his huckster ways. That boy will grab anyone passing the booth. In all, I would say we had a good time and learned a bit as well.
Ed.
NSS Press Release
May 6, 1999
National Space Society Embraces Space Potential with new Lunar Research Awards
(Washington, DC) -- May 6 -- In celebration of Space Day, the National Space Society (NSS) announces it has granted three fellowship awards through the Center for Lunar Research (CLR) to students at the University of Wisconsin. Established in 1998, the CLR's first activity was to support the analysis of data from both the Clementine and Lunar Prospector missions.
The three students chosen for the first awards are:
- Junjie Ding, an Engineering PhD student, will correlate Lunar Prospector neutron spectrometric data related to hydrogen with Lunar Prospector gamma ray spectrometric data and Clementine and Earth-based optical spectrometric data related to the chemical components in feldspar;
- - J. Zalewski, an undergraduate engineering student, will be proposing improved models of lunar hydrogen production using Lunar Prospector data;
- - J. Malecki, an undergraduate student majoring in physics, math and astronomy, will be correlating Lunar Prospector hydrogen data with calculations of the pick-up ion transport and reimplication into the lunar surface;
To learn more about how you can participate in the activities visit the NSS Online at http://www.nss.org/ or on AOL at keyword: NSS.
The National Space Society, celebrating 25 years of space advocacy, promotes a spacefaring civilization living and working in thriving communities beyond the Earth. Members of the Society's Board of Governors, including Dr. Harrison Schmidt, former Apollo 17 astronaut, and Dr. Alan Binder, Principal Investigator for the Lunar Prospector mission, are working with the Society's membership to take proactive steps towards returning humans to the Moon.
JPL Press Releases
Media Relations Office
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Pasadena, California 91109.
NASA's Mars Rover Test Drive Racks Up Miles and Miles
April 29, 1999
It is the ultimate test drive for the newest otherworldly vehicle. A few practice spins around an ancient lake bed in the Mojave desert this week with the next-generation Mars rover are helping NASA scientists and engineers learn more about driving the real thing on Mars.
"It's pretty exciting out here. We want to rack up a lot of miles and see how far this rover can go," said Dr. Raymond Arvidson, a geologist from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, and mission director for the field tests. "We are doing an 'end-to-end' test, using systems similar to what we will use on Mars. These test drives will help ensure that we will have a successful Mars rover mission."
Future robotic rovers on Mars will need to find the best rocks to bring back to Earth, samples that are likely to contain the evidence scientists need to prove that life once existed on the red planet. The rovers are being built and tested by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.
To find the best sample, scientists need a good retriever. This week they're testing the work horse, er dog, named FIDO -- Field Integrated Design and Operations -- that is helping them figure out how to use the kinds of instruments the next Mars rovers will need to fetch the most scientifically interesting rocks. FIDO is designed to test the advanced technology of the Athena flight rover and science payload that will be launched as part of NASA's Mars Sample Return missions in 2003 and 2005.
"No place on Earth is like Mars, but our field site on an ancient lake bed in the Mojave Desert comes close. So far we've been able to use the rover's mini-corer to drill a rock sample and we've used the microscopic camera to look inside the hole," Arvidson said. "We're practicing looking for rocks that contain carbonate minerals. If we find those kinds of rocks on Mars it may tell us if the early planet had a carbon dioxide atmosphere."
"We've had a fantastic week. In just a few days, we've shown that we can find good rocks, drill samples out of them, and take the samples back to a lander. That's a huge step forward in preparing to bring the first samples back from Mars," said Dr. Steven Squyres, principal investigator for the Athena rover payload from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
"FIDO's advanced technology includes the ability to navigate over distances on its own and avoid natural obstacles without receiving directions from a controller," said Dr. Eric Baumgartner, a robotics engineer at JPL and mission engineer for the desert field tests.
FIDO is about the size of a coffee table and weighs as much as a St. Bernard, about 70 kilograms (150 pounds). The rover moves up to 300 meters an hour (less than a mile per hour) over smooth terrain, using its onboard stereo vision systems to detect and avoid obstacles as it travels "on-the-fly."
"FIDO is about six times the size of Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner and is far more capable of performing its job without frequent human help," Dr. Paul S. Schenker, who directs FIDO rover development at JPL as part of the NASA Exploration Technology Program. "FIDO navigates continuously using on-board computer vision and autonomous controls, and has similar capabilities for eye-to-hand coordination of its robotic science arm and mast. The rover has six wheels that are all independently steered and can drive forward or backward allowing FIDO to turn or back up with the use of its rear-mounted cameras."
In addition to testing FIDO, the scientists and engineers are supporting students from four schools around the country in designing and carrying out their own mission with the rover. This is the first time students have been able to remotely operate a NASA/JPL rover. The students, from Los Angeles, Phoenix, Ithaca, NY, and St, Louis, (LAPIS), form an integrated mission team and are responsible for planning, conducting and archiving a two-day mission using FIDO.
"It is important to excite young people about space exploration and discovery and these tests provide an excellent educational opportunity," Arvidson said. "We're including high school students in the FIDO tests as a pilot experiment in which the students gain a sense of participation in the field trials by planning their own mission segments and working with us to implement the rover's assignments."
The FIDO rover development and the Mars Sample Return 2003/2005 missions are managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science Washington, DC. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA.
More information about FIDO is available at: http://wundow.wustl.edu/rover
Mars Global Surveyor Mission Status
May 7, 1999
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft returned to normal mapping operations Wednesday night, May 5.
The spacecraft is healthy and all of its science instruments are turned on. A gimbal, or hinge, on the spacecraft's dish-shaped high-gain antenna still has a restriction that limits its range of motion, but this will have no effect on the mission until next February when the Mars-to-Earth geometry will again prevent the antenna from pointing continuously at Earth. Engineers are looking at options for conducting the mission after February so that there will be a minimal impact on how much science data the mission can collect and send to Earth.
At 7:45 a.m. Pacific time today, Global Surveyor fired its small thrusters for about two minutes in order to fine-tune its orbit around Mars. The mapping orbit was designed so that the spacecraft does not fly over precisely the same swath of Martian landscape, or "ground track," from one week to the next. The spacecraft must fire its thrusters every few months to keep the necessary ground-track separation. This is especially important now since the science team is in the process of an intensive four-week campaign to acquire stereo images of the planet.
Magnetic Stripes Preserve Record of Ancient Mars
April 29, 1999
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor has discovered surprising evidence of past movement of the Martian crust, further evidence that ancient Mars was a more dynamic, Earth-like planet than it is today.
Scientists using the spacecraft's magnetometer have discovered banded patterns of magnetic fields on the Martian surface. The adjacent magnetic bands point in opposite directions, giving these invisible stripes a striking similarity to patterns seen in the crust of Earth's sea floors. On the Earth, the sea floor spreads apart slowly at mid-oceanic ridges as new crust flows up from Earth's hot interior. Meanwhile, the direction of Earth's magnetic field reverses occasionally, resulting in alternating stripes in the new crust that carry a fossil record of the past hundreds of million years of Earth's magnetic history, a finding that validated the once-controversial theory of plate tectonics.
"The discovery of this pattern on Mars could revolutionize current thinking of the red planet's evolution," said Dr. Jack Connerney of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, an investigator on the Global Surveyor's magnetometer team. "If the bands on Mars are an imprint of crustal spreading, they are a relic of an early era of plate tectonics on Mars. However, unlike on Earth, the implied plate tectonic activity on Mars is most likely extinct."
Alternate explanations for the banded structure may involve the fracturing and breakup of an ancient, uniformly magnetized crust due to volcanic activity or tectonic stresses from the rise and fall of neighboring terrain.
"Imagine a thin coat of dried paint on a balloon, where the paint is the crust of Mars," explained Dr. Mario Acuña of Goddard, principal investigator on the Global Surveyor magnetometer. "If we inflate the balloon further, cracks can develop in the paint, and the edges of the cracks will automatically have opposite polarities, because nature does not allow there to be a positive pole without a negative counterpart."
Peer-reviewed research based on the observations will be published in the April 30 issue of the journal Science.
The bands of magnetized crust apparently formed in the distant past when Mars had an active dynamo, or hot core of molten metal, which generated a global magnetic field. Mars was geologically active, with molten rock rising from below cooling at the surface and forming new crust. As the new crust solidified, the magnetic field that permeated the rock was "frozen" in the crust. Periodically, conditions in the dynamo changed and the global magnetic field reversed direction. The oppositely directed magnetic field was then frozen into newer crust.
"Like a Martian tape recorder, the crust has preserved a fossil record of the magnetic field directions that prevailed at different times in the ancient past," Connerney said. When the planet's hot core cooled, the dynamo ceased and the global magnetic field of Mars vanished. However, a record of the magnetic field was preserved in the crust and detected by the Global Surveyor instrument.
The mission's map of Martian magnetic regions may help solve another mystery -- the origin of a striking difference in appearance between the smooth, sparsely cratered northern lowlands of Mars and the heavily cratered southern highlands. The map reveals that the northern regions are largely free of magnetism, indicating the northern crust formed after the dynamo died.
"The dynamo likely died a few hundred million years after Mars' formation. One possibility is that later asteroid impacts followed by volcanic activity heated and shocked large areas of the northern crust, obliterating any local magnetic fields and smoothing the terrain," Acuña said. "When the crust cooled, there was no longer a global magnetic field to become frozen in again."
The map also identifies an area in the southern highlands as the oldest surviving unmodified crust on Mars. This area on Mars is where the magnetic stripes are most prominent. The bands are oriented approximately east-to-west and are about 160 kilometers (100 miles) wide and 965 kilometers (600 miles) long, although the longest band stretches more than 1,930 kilometers (1,200 miles).
"The bands are wider than those on Earth, perhaps for a couple of reasons," Connerney said. "The Martian crust could have been generated at a greater rate, causing a given magnetic field to be imprinted over a wider area before it reversed direction. Second, the Martian magnetic field may have reversed direction less frequently, which would have given more time for any one field direction to imprint itself in the steadily moving crust, resulting in wider bands.
"In order to call this pattern a crustal spreading center like that observed in the mid-oceanic ridges on Earth, we need to find a point of symmetry, where the pattern on one side matches the pattern on the other. We have not yet found evidence of this type of symmetry," Connerney added.
Graphics of the magnetometer data, other supporting material and general information on the Global Surveyor mission may be found on the Internet at:
ftp://pao.gsfc.nasa.gov/newsmedia/mars/magnetic/
http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/index.html.
Galileo Proves Old Spacecraft Can Learn New Tricks
May 5, 1999
NASA's Galileo spacecraft team members are all smiles after Galileo proved to be a star pupil by successfully demonstrating specially designed, newly installed software and saving this morning's flyby of Jupiter's pockmarked moon Callisto.
During previous flybys of Jupiter's moons, a recurring electrical glitch caused the spacecraft computer to reset and enter "safing" mode, shutting down all non-essential functions until ground controllers could restore normal operations.
The Galileo team pooled engineering and problem-solving talents to develop special software, known as a "bus reset patch. "The name refers to Galileo's "data bus," which transfers information to various parts of the spacecraft. The software was designed to boost Galileo's I.Q. by teaching it to recognize symptoms of the glitch and correct the problem itself, without entering safing mode.
The spacecraft was put to the test twice on Monday, May 3, when the glitch popped up as Galileo was approaching Callisto. Galileo quickly diagnosed the problem, determined there was no threat to spacecraft health, and decided for itself not to enter safing mode. This allowed all spacecraft and scientific functions to continue uninterrupted, with Galileo snapping pictures and gathering observations from an altitude as close as 1,322 kilometers (821 miles) above Callisto.
"Galileo proved it's an 'A' student," said Project Manager Jim Erickson. "This is an example of our efforts at JPL to make the spacecraft more independent and better able to evaluate and deal with problems without intervention from ground controllers."
"We're so thrilled that our efforts paid off and Galileo performed as we had hoped," said Nagin Cox, who helps oversee the team of current and former Galileo personnel that developed the new software patch.
In an unrelated occurrence during this morning's Callisto flyby, the pointing control for the scan platform, which aims Galileo toward observation targets, switched on its own from a very accurate gyro-controlled system to a less accurate backup mode that uses the star scanner without gyros.
Nonetheless, the spacecraft continued to record its observations, but observations taken by an instrument called the near infrared mapping spectrometer may be less sharp than planned. Preliminary analysis shows this anomaly occurred just after Galileo's closest approach to Callisto, or 7:56 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, the time the signal was received on Earth. The Galileo team is investigating this anomaly, and preliminary analysis shows it may be related to previous gyro anomalies.
Galileo has been orbiting Jupiter and its moons since December 1995. Its original, two-year mission ended in December 1997, and the spacecraft is currently more than halfway through a two-year extended tour, called Galileo Europa Mission.
I talked with N. Talbot Brady at Norwescon about the current mission, and he mentioned this new glitch avoidance circuit and others. One big problem with the spacecraft is that part of it rotates and part of it is stable. The Electrical junction between the two can develop a static discharge which will send the craft into safe mode. The software is designed to let it reset itself. Talbot is also one of those programmers responsible for saving Galileo by reprogramming the mission after the main transmitter jammed on the way to Jupiter.
Ed.
Deep Space 1 Mission Status Report
May 7, 1999
Deep Space 1 went into standby on Thursday, May 6, at about 8:33 p.m. Pacific time. This involved the spacecraft pointing to the Sun, disengaging its high-gain antenna, and reverting to its low-gain antenna to communicate with Earth.
Within an hour, the mission team had verified that the spacecraft was in standby and that it was stable. Since then, the team has been analyzing data and sending commands to the spacecraft in order to gain more insight into the cause of the event. Based on these observations, the team expects to begin recovery procedures by the end of the day today. Such procedures typically take several work days to complete.
The last few weeks have been busy ones for the mission team. On Tuesday, April 27, Deep Space 1 completed a six-week period of thrusting with its ion propulsion system. It took less than 5 kilograms (under 11 pounds), of xenon to provide the steady push for the six weeks of thrusting that ended on April 27, during which the spacecraft's speed was increased by nearly 300 meters per second (about 650 miles per hour). If the spacecraft had expended the same amount of standard rocket propellant instead of using ion propulsion, the speed would have changed by a mere 50 miles per hour. Deep Space 1 now has completed a total of more than 73 days of thrusting.
On Tuesday, May 4, the mission team successfully conducted further tests of its autonomous navigation system. On Thursday, May 6, the team successfully completed a calibration of Deep Space 1' s combination camera and imaging spectrometer.
Of Deep Space 1's payload of 12 exotic technologies, seven have accomplished 100 percent of their planned basic testing and the others are on schedule, with at least 75 percent of those experiments complete.
Deep Space 1 is now nearly 110 million kilometers (more than 68 million miles) from Earth. Radio signals traveling at the speed of light take more than 12 minutes to make the round trip.
Boeing Delta III Rocket Fails to Place Orion 3 Satellite in Proper Orbit
May 6, 1999
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE) via NewsEdge Corporation - Loral Space & Communications Ltd. announced that its Orion 3 broadcast video and data communications satellite was placed into a lower-than-expected orbit after its launch last night on a Boeing Delta III rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Florida.
Data from the satellite is still being received and analyzed to determine the cause of the failure and what further steps, if any, can be taken.
According to Boeing, the Delta III's second stage apparently failed to complete its second planned burn. As a result, the Orion 3, which was manufactured by Hughes Space & Communications of El Segundo, Calif., achieved an orbit well below the planned final altitude.
"We are very disappointed with this outcome," said Terry Hart, president of Loral Skynet which manages the Telstar and Orion fleets. "Loral, Hughes and Boeing will conduct an investigation to determine the specific reasons for the failure. Until then, we cannot speculate on the precise cause. Despite advances in aerospace technology over the years, launches remain a complex undertaking, and risks are an inherent part of that complexity."
The satellite and launch were fully insured for $265 million. DACOM, a Korean communications company which had leased eight transponders on Orion 3 for a total of $89 million, had already made some pre-payments in the amount of $35.5 million. Under Loral's agreement with DACOM, this amount is subject to refund in the event that Orion 3 fails to commence commercial operation by June 30, 1999.
Loral Space & Communications is a high technology company that primarily concentrates on satellite manufacturing and satellite-based services. For more information, visit Loral's web site at http://www.loral.com.
Note:
We will welcome any articles, editorials, referrals, or new web sites from any Chapter member. Please let us know. If you have ideas for speakers and/or projects for the chapter, let any officer know by E-mail, or in person at a meeting. Thank you.
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