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The Planetary Society WeblogGuest Blogger: Doug EllisonOctober 2 - 8, 2006
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Doug Ellison is a Multimedia Producer for a Medical E-Learning firm by day, but in his free time, he started a forum to share and compare techniques and ideas of rover image processing which turned into Unmannedspaceflight.com in early 2005. He has given many lectures to schools, local astronomy societies, and the British Astronomical Association about the rovers and other Mars missions, and he produces Rover Audio Updates with Jim Bell for The Planetary Society Website. His favorite color is blue, but he doesn't like blue cheese. |
Who the Heck is Doug Ellison?
"Do you have any interest in blogging for a week?" Pre-Maternal hormones
must have sent Emily a little crazy, I thought. What the heck, no harm in
having a go is there?
Then the list of my fellow 'Gloggers' (don't look for it in a dictionary, I made the word up) went on line. Gulp. I don't direct a Planetarium nor do I have 4 cool cameras on Mars. I struggle to navigate around my home town of Leicester, let alone the highways and byways of the Solar System and whilst I've been looking for Stardust@home, I've never tried to actually collect any. I needed a hook -- a "plot" for my week. I had a look through the diary that Emily prepares -- hmm -- International Astronautical Congress in Valencia. This is the era of the budget airline, I could take my long suffering better half Helen, and she could take her Mum -- a holiday for them and a fascinating week for me. I like the engineering side of spacecraft and the technology behind them perhaps even more than the science sometimes. Maybe I could go and report from the meeting for the week -- but The Planetary Society wouldn't be reckless enough to let me do that -- they have a reputation to maintain. Despite their better judgement -- a few weeks later I get the email I was hoping for "PRENSA ACREDITADA". We were going to Valencia!
So why on Earth am I here and who on Earth am I? It's a long story which I will spare you, but suffice to say it has involved a lot of late nights with Photoshop and panorama stitching software. Since 2004, it's been about confusion and panic in understanding how to manage a website. Ever since it's been about the kindness, generosity and talent in the people who now visit the forum I set up almost three years ago to share the results I was getting from some idle toying with the images being sent back by Spirit and Opportunity. I don't know what I've done right, but Unmannedspaceflight.com has grown to be a small community of like minded enthusiasts with occasional contributions from the engineers and scientists who build these spacecraft and their instruments and guide them safely across our solar system and beyond. With the help of my ever reliable co-admins, I think we've perhaps bridged a little of the gap between the informed enthusiast and the professional scientist.
Last September, Steve Squyres, Principle Investigator for MER was kind enough to spare me an hour of his time. We sat outside the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and after looking at the very apparatus with which JJ Thompson discovered the electron, Steve answered questions that people from the forum had sent to me. He was able to give answers that an informed audience could enjoy. Some in depth science as well as some more light hearted discussions such as the "S1K" bug -- scripts for processing rover data that never expected to use a four digit sol number -- and we got through the whole thing without asking how long he expected the rovers to last. The MP3 that resulted from that chat was much enjoyed by the forum. After one member told us that he was partially deaf and so couldn't enjoy it, the community came together and in less than a week had transcribed almost an hour of audio which I then put together as a PDF so that he could enjoy it as well. Some 320 odd people have now read that transcription and everyone seems to have enjoyed and appreciated the time Steve took to talk on "our" level. I always wondered if there was scope for a community like that – and the forum today proves that yes, there are enough lunatics like myself who enjoy nothing more than a new PDS data release and a night of image processing.
Running 'UMSF' has also opened a few other doors. I've been invited to give talks to astronomy societies and schools. Sharing in the adventure that Spirit and Opportunity continue to play out millions of miles from home is a thrill in itself. It's quite an honour to show people a stereo picture taken from the rim of Endurance Crater and hear the collective intake of breath it never fails to invoke.
 Stereo Image of Endurance Crater Rim Front Hazcam Anaglyph taken by Opportunity from the rim of Endurance Crater on Sol 119. Image requires stereo glasses (red filter left, blue/green filter right). Credit: JPL / NASA / Cornell. Processing: Doug Ellison |
There's another noise, an 'ooo' that changes into a 'wow' that evolves into
an amazed chuckle. That is usually reserved for the view from the top of Husband
Hill. Even school children who would rather be texting their friends and playing
their PSP's can muster a "Woah" at the cliffs, craters and chasms presented
in a stereo picture from Mars Express. I wonder what noises they will come
up with for the spectacular results we can expect from MRO and MSL! More recently,
swapping emails with Jim Bell (the guy with the cool cameras on Mars and a
fellow glogger) we came up with the idea of doing little podcasts, take the
questions people might have about Pancam and the art of taking images on the
surface of Mars and using some VOIP software, record a Q'n'A every month or
so. You may have seen these as the Rover
Audio Updates that The Planetary Society kindly host for me. So much for
10 minutes or so eh Jim?
I'm not an engineer, but I'll always be there with the 20:20 engineering hindsight when things go wrong. I'm not a geologist, even though I can tell you the story of water at Meridiani Planum. Perhaps I'm a communicator, trying to encourage a two way flow of information between space science and space fan. I don't have the reputation or esteem of my fellow gloggers, but I hope to make up for it in quantity. Throughout this week, I'll be reporting back from the International Astronautical Congress here in Valencia -- a conference dedicated to the engineering and management of space missions rather than their scientific results as one might hear at DPS or LPSC. Hopefully I'll be able to speak to a few of the people who make up that chain from design idea, to hardware, launch, flight, navigation, taking data, beaming it home, and putting it back together on the ground.
I don't expect to do the astonishingly comprehensive coverage of a conference
that your regular blogger can – somehow Emily manages to be in 3 sessions at
once and report on it all with verbose details and a perfect recollection of
names. I have a backup plan however -- thanks to some quite superb cooperation
from the Mars Exploration Rover team, Opportunity has arrived at the spectacular
Victoria Crater just in time for my week of glogging, and Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter has arrived in its science orbit for a brief week long science observation
phase before solar conjunction puts the Sun between Earth and Mars, preventing
reliable radio communications for a few weeks. Both Victoria Crater, and the
astonishing HiRISE camera from MRO will offer some spectacular images this
week and it will be fascinating to see how quickly and how well the enthusiast
community can download, process and publish their own masterpieces from the
imagery at Meridiani.
 Stereo Image of Victoria Crater Rim Pancam Anaglyph taken by Opportunity on Sol 952 of Cape Verde on the rim of Victoria Crater. Image requires stereo glasses (red filter left, blue/green filter right). Credit: JPL / NASA / Cornell. Processing: Doug Ellison |
So, who am I and why am I here? My name is Doug Ellison, and I'm addicted to space exploration. With a bit of luck, perhaps this week I can make you an addict too.
The Big Guns
What a place. La Ciudad de las Artes y la Ciencias (City of Arts and Sciences) is the most extraordinary complex of beautiful architecture, large shallow open pools and large science museum, Imax theatre and arts centre. It is exquisite by day and ethereal by night. Nice though the vast expanses of water are, a pair of large wellington boots would have made the walk from venue to venue a little faster. You constantly find new ‘tricks' with the buildings -- such as the side of the Museu producing pin sharp loud echoes that appear to come from your own head, and the ends of the building shaped in a quarter of a dome – with a whisper from one end audible 200 feet away at the other.
 La Ciudad de las Artes y la Ciencias From Left to Right -- Palau de les Arts, L'Hemisferic, and, on the right the Museu de les Ciencies. Credit: Doug Ellison |
And so to business. Marc Garneau, a former president of the Canadian Space Agency moderated the first session and introduced the first speaker, Jean-Jacques Dordain, the Director General of ESA. As a Brit, and thus a European, the first speaker was arguably the one for which I have the most vested interest given that a chunk (albeit far too small a chunk in my opinion) of my taxes go toward ESA. ESA is a complex and perhaps convoluted organisation -- with its constituent countries both conducting space activities in their own right and contributing to ESA which conducts space activates of its own. Dorain was able to describe the highlights of ESA activities in the last year and they are something to be proud of. Late 2005 saw the launch of Eumetsats second MSG, the second generation of the Meteosat geostationary weather satellites . The first Galileo technical demonstration spacecraft (Giove-A) in order to begin the establishment of Europe's own version of GPS, Tomas Reiter onboard ISS as part of Expedition 13 and now Expedition 14's crew on board. Venus Express arrived, Mars Express started an extended mission and SMART-1 finished its mission in style only a few weeks ago. Cryosat was the only major failure of the last year with a replacement (Cryosat 2) already scheduled for 2009. Dordain then commented that all four semi-finalists for the Soccer World Cup this summer were all ESA member states…all round a good year for ESA!
What is the future of Europe in Space? The EU and ESA are developing a combined space policy to be endorsed in '07 to help strengthen coordination between partners within Europe. There are currently 17 members states and they expect to expand this to 22 in the next 5 years. Europe can not be a leader with the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), but it can make a contribution he said. Meanwhile preparations for BepiColombo and Exo-Mars continue. He finished by looking forward to the launch of METOP, the first test of the VEGA launch vehicle first stage, the launch of Galileo's second test satellite (Giove-B), the launch of the first ATV in mid '07 and the Columbus module in Sept/Oct 2007 and a total of three European astronauts to visiting the ISS in the next year.
Next up, Mike Griffin, 11th NASA administrator. If I am honest, much of what was said by Mike and indeed all the head of agency representatives was slightly vague, almost a marketing pitch for each agency and a collective back slap for international cooperation. Regarding the VSE, Griffin mentioned a meeting that occurred this past April with 13 nations attending to discuss "What will we do when we get to the Moon" and they continue to work this issue developing a database of the scientific goals they wish to investigate when we return there in there in the next decade. Lunar exploration is rapidly accelerating with the recent end of the SMART-1 mission being only an introduction to new missions from Japan, China, and India in the next few years and NASA's own and LRO in ‘08. Most interestingly, he advocated the foundation of a collective pool of lunar data -- formatting the data from all the missions planned in a universal format to share the data between agencies and scientists from all countries to better our understanding of our Moon. NASA can not dictate the direction of other agencies, he said, but can invite other agencies to join in what NASA is doing. A question from the floor asked how the balance and priority is set between aeronautics, astronautics, and between manned and unmanned spaceflight. "NASA doesn't set its own priorities" he said. He explained that what NASA does is dictated by the U.S. administration and that currently, of the around $17B budget, about $5.3 is for robotic Earth and space science, just under $1B for Aeronautics, and the rest for manned spaceflight in two forms -- many billions flying the shuttle and to finish the ISS -- and some remainder being for the development of Orion, the replacement vehicle to launch astronauts, both American and foreign, to the ISS and beyond.
 Mike Griffin at IAC 2006 NASA Administrator Mike Griffin presents to the assembled IAC delegates. Credit: Doug Ellison |
Arguably it's most public projects are the Canadarm and Canadarm 2, The Space Shuttle's robotic arm and the Space Stations robotic arm respectively. The Station arm is due for a new set of tools to give it high dexterity in the next few years. As for the future they plan to launch one mission per year, roughly alternating between a ‘Microsat' and a ‘Smallsat'. One of these Microsats, ‘MOST' (Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars) is a 50kg Space Telescope that has been in orbit for just over three years Another Microsat planned for launch is Cassiope, a mixed mission to study Earth's atmosphere and test a communications payload described as "Fex-Ex in the sky" that can dump terabytes of data down to the ground rapidly. Their current budget is suffering because of the success of previous missions requiring increased mission management funding for continued operations so little money remains for new projects -- but by sticking to those three areas of expertise, they hope to move forward with new projects.
One question from the floor asked what launch vehicles they expected to use for their Microsats. Jha explained that Canada decided long ago not to make its own launch vehicles and so they buy launch services on a competitive basis from Russian, European, and American providers. Some might argue that the CSA should be trying to gain expertise in the fields in which it lacks skill and knowledge, but personally I think that sticking to your proven abilities, working with international partners to deploy those abilities, and getting the resources you lack on a competitive commercial basis is arguably the best way to spend a limited budget.
G.Madhavan Nair was next, the Chairman of ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organisation. They have gone the other way to Canada, developing their own rockets and technologies. They currently have 15 active spacecraft -- 8 in geostationary orbit for communications, television, and meteorology. It was fascinating to hear how they use their on orbit assets to help their rural communities. India is huge -- 1.1 billion people, nearly four times the population of the USA, and 70% of those people live in rural areas. Communicating with this rural population is difficult, so one satellite ( imaginatively called Edusat ) is dedicated entirely to education. It provides communication between large educational institutions and allows them to make the most of the few professionals they have by having one professor lecturing via Edusat to 30 to 100 classrooms at the same time. Around 10,000 classrooms are connected via this system. It wasn't clear if Edusat was also used for this next purpose, but another use of communications is remote medical diagnosis. Patient data is sent to the medical professional via satellite, and then the patient and doctor can have a video consultation. Both uses seemed an excellent way of helping remote communities in education and health.
With so many international space leaders present, Chandrayaan-1 was an obvious point of discussion. A mission to the Moon with a variety of launch dates depending on where you look ( best estimate is '07-'08 ) is a true international mission. It is an Indian spacecraft on an Indian launch vehicle -- but with five Indian, four European, and two American instruments onboard. One to look forward to and almost certainly -- combined with the US Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2008 -- the basis of what Mike Griffin alluded to earlier regarding an international unified data format for lunar exploration.
Time for lunch, then another meeting -- so China, Japan and Russia will have to wait for the next installation!
The Big Guns, Part Two
by Doug Ellison
So, as I was saying…
Next up at Monday morning's Agency heads Plenary was Keiji Tachikawa, President of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Tachikawa opened by mentioning JAXA's dedication to the GEOSS agreement, the Global Earth Observation System of Systems which serves to share the information from various meteorological and other Earth observation satellites for a variety of purposes such as hydrology, climate and weather, biodiversity, energy, and disaster management. JAXA is particularly dedicated to contributing data toward disaster management, climate change, and water management. To this end, Tachikawa showed two images from some of the satellites -- a radar observation that showed the extent of a landslide in the Philippines and a visible image of flood damage in northern Thailand.
Moving onto space-based astronomy, he mentioned Japan's X-ray telescope that launched in February and the planed 2011 launch of Astro G -- an on orbit radio telescope to be used in conjunction with ground based observatories for VLBI observations of star forming regions and the centre of galaxies, this new facility will hopefully bring a tenfold increase in both resolution and sensitivity. The September 23 launch of Hinode ( meaning Sunrise ) was an obvious highlight for international cooperation with involvement from the US, UK, and ESA. This solar observatory is expected to help advance our understanding of the mechanisms of the Sun and help with predictions of space weather -- which may seem a remote and unimportant subject, but when it can damage our satellites and even cause power surges in our electricity grids, it's easy to see why this is something that needs monitoring.
JAXA has had mixed fortunes in planetary exploration with the loss of their Mars orbiter Nozomi after a very long unplanned alteration to their trajectory, and with the excellent science results but possible failed sample return of Hayabusa to Asteroid Itokawa. Future plans include Planet C, a Venus orbiter to observe the dynamic processes within the Venusian atmosphere in 2010, and the JAXA involvement in the ESA's BepiColumbo mission to Mercury set for launch in 2013. Next summer will also see the launch of Selene, their lunar orbiter mission and the largest spacecraft to visit the Moon since the Apollo spacecraft. It will investigate the entire Moon to study elemental and mineralogical composition, the subsurface structure, and gravity field to help improve our understanding of the origin and evolution of the Moon. A delegate asked why JAXA seemed to be doing a lot of international cooperation, but not with its nearest neighbours, to which Tachikawa replied it is something they are working on. I must admit it seems a little strange to see so many partnerships between ESA, NASA, and JAXA but nothing between JAXA, ISRO, and CNSA.
Wei Zhang, Director of Foreign Affairs for the China National Space Administration (CNSA) followed with a set of rogue PowerPoint slides that wouldn't behave and thus his presentation was a little disjointed and difficult to follow. Here's what I was able to catch. There have been 91 launches to date of their Long March launch vehicles, and six series of satellites, the first of which were based on Geostationary satellites. More recently their meteorological satellite FY-1 observed a strong typhoon. Their current plans echo those of ISRO -- to use on orbit assets to help bring information to rural areas. The Chinese plan is to provide television and phone coverage for every village with more than 20 families via their next generation of satellite. They also plan a unified high resolution system for Earth observation, but he did not mention if they were a part of the GEOSS plan. Looking further forward they are building their own Satellite navigation system and a series of new launch vehicles in the next 10-15 years using a new 5-meter-wide core stage and current vehicles as boosters, allowing up to 12 tonnes to Geostationary Earth Orbit, and 25 tonnes to Low Earth Orbit.
Finally, Anatoly Perminov -- Head of the Federal Space Agency, Russia. The FAS has just finished a new white paper which outlines their plans for the 2006 to 2015 time frame including Venus D and their Phobos Grunt sample return mission (which Lou Friedman tells me means Phobos Soil). The Russian President has asked for the Glonass navigation system to be upgraded and fitted out with 24 satellites and matching ground facilities by 2009. Perhaps a little ominously, he cited 2016 to 2020 as the agreed termination date for the ISS and alluded to a higher inclination orbital facility to follow it and perhaps interplanetary human flight in the 2025 to 2030 timeframe, but Perminov described this as a job that one country alone cannot manage, it would have to be an international partnership. Discussing partnerships, he mentioned the major agreement with ESA for manned spaceflight and future upgrades to the Soyuz spacecraft to make it compatible with a lunar mission. Perminov was the last speaker for this session and the moderator Marc Garneau nearly chased us out the building as we were behind schedule (I'd blame the bubble artist). The next challenge was finding what session to sit in on for Monday afternoon….which I will tell you about tomorrow!
That's all from me for Monday…I'm here all week, try the Paella (seriously – it's very tasty)
Bringing Home the Data
Monday afternoon and the first of the technical sessions. Each technical
session is split over more than a dozen small lecture halls each covering
a different subject. One could not possibly cover them all so you have
to pick one and basically stick to it. Today I picked "Near Earth and Interplanetary
Communications Systems" for two reasons. Firstly, I knew there would be a
friendly face. I am a member of the British Astronomical Association and
have given a few talks at BAA meetings, where I have met Nick James who
works for BAE Systems back in the UK, and I knew he would be presenting a
paper on a part of ESA's version of the Deep Space Network (DSN). I didn't
expect to really understand the paper, but it's always good to stretch your
brain from time to time! Secondly, a paper about future technologies for increasing
data return from Mars looked very interesting.
Still very much a conference virgin, I managed to find the wrong lecture hall (and caught the very end of what I'm sure was an excellent presentation about the SIM Planet Finder mission ) before realising that SIM had nothing to do with Communications…so I snuck out and into the lecture hall next door. At this point, I was convinced that Jim Graf (MRO project manager ) thought I was stalking him as he too was in the room next door, and I followed him straight into this one. Obviously he wasn't in the wrong room however -- as he asked a fascinating question about SIM before leaving! Wait till he finds out that I AM stalking him today so I can ask him some questions about his paper on Tuesday afternoon.
So Mars Telecoms it is -- Charles D. Edwards from JPL presenting. Currently there are three NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars: Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, and the new and shiny Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). MRO is the state of the art in terms of interplanetary communications. It has a large 3-metre-wide high gain antenna and two different transmitters -- a 100 Watt X-band and a 35 Watt Ka-Band. The Ka band is more of a technical demonstration, with the X-Band being the primary communications pathway. The combination of a 34 metre dish at a Deep Space Network station, the large dish on MRO, and its 100 Watt transmitter means that at the largest range between MRO and Earth, it can achieve 650 kbps. Now kbps can get a little confusing -- so I'm going to get a bit European where fuel efficiency is litres per 100km and not miles per gallon. I hope my maths is right but 650 kbps would let you download a CD in about around two hours. At closest range, MRO can achieve as much as 5200 kbps, a figure limited by the avionics onboard the spacecraft, and can download an entire CD in around 17 minutes.
 Assembly of MRO's High Gain Antenna The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's 3-metre-wide High Gain Antenna being maneuvered into position during final assembly at KSC. Credit: NASA / KSC |
That's a lot of data in a short amount of time, but scientists always want
better resolution… better resolution spatially, spectrally, and temporally
(i.e. they want clearer pictures, in more wavelengths, more often). To give
you an idea -- an average image taken by the MOC camera on Mars Global Surveyor
might be around 10 Megapixels in size. HiRISE -- the new high resolution camera
on MRO can take images that are as much as 1,200 Megapixels. (and I'm going
to show you a few "bites" of
HiRISE data later this week) It's not hard to see why they want a much bigger
pipe to the ground.
So, what options are there to improve the downlink capacity from Mars?
Well, the first is on MRO already -- a Ka band transmitter. Despite only
using around a third of the power of the X-Band transmitter, it can downlink
data at that maximum range at around 320 kbps (around four hours per CD). "But that's SLOWER" I hear you ask. Yes -- but on only a third of the power. Because Ka-Band is a much higher frequency 32Ghz instead of the 8.4Ghz for X-Band, for complex reasons that I don't fully understand, you can use a higher data rate with the same power of transmission. The downside is that you have to point your dish much more accurately -- a symptom of the higher frequency. So, on the board at JPL is a 180 Watt Ka Band transmitter. I felt the need to shout "MORE POWER" at this point. With a dish with a 70 metre diameter on the ground (which we have….but only three of them) a 180 Watt Ka Band transmitter (which is ready to go), and a 3 metre dish on the spacecraft, you could get 8000 kbps at the farthest Earth-Mars range. Now we're talking a CD in around 10 minutes…and
the farthest range. I don't have figures for the closest range data rate with
that sort of technology, but it's easy to imagine it being perhaps 20,000 kbps
or more (a CD in less than 3 minutes perhaps)
 MRO Data Return This graph shows how much data MRO is expected to return compared with previous interplanetary missions. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech |
AND….then you can get clever with dishes on the ground. The Deep Space Network
is a stretched resource with an urgent need to upgrades. The most popular design
on the cards at the moment is to use 12 metre dishes, mass produced and arrayed
together to act as one dish. 40 of these would give you that same performance
as the one 70 metre dish I just mentioned. How about if you had not 40, but 400
-- and you increased the size of the dish on your spacecraft from 3 metres to
6 metres? Now the figures REALLY jump! At the largest Earth-Mars range -- you
could have 320,000 kbps. Now we're talking an entire CD down linked in less than
20 seconds. Look back at that current MRO figure again -- two hours… down to
as little as 20 seconds with just a few available technologies.
What about that ESA paper….I was right, I didn't understand it very well. I felt my brain liquefying as it was presented. Here's how I understand it: The DSN has been able to use two dishes at different stations for some time to track a spacecraft and by doing so increase the accuracy of their tracking and ranging -- in other words they can use two dishes to calculate where a spacecraft is more accurately. This is something that ESA has had to "borrow" from
the DSN up until earlier this year. ESA has two of its own dishes now -- 35
metre diameter facilities, one in Spain and one in Western Australia. Nick
James worked on a project to deploy this ability to use the two dishes (Called
Delta DOR) to better calculate the position of Venus Express during the critical orbit insertion manoeuvre earlier this year. It involves calibrating the system by looking at a Pulsar at the same time as looking at the spacecraft, but the end result is that using one dish, they can expect to locate a spacecraft down to about an accuracy of 7.5 kilometres at 1 AU range. Using DDOR that number comes down to 2.3 kilometres -- a good increase and a vital one in targeting spacecraft in the future for landing on Mars or other critical targeting manoeuvres. One spacecraft wanting to use this ability in the near future is the Gaia mission which
has asked to have its speed calculated to an accuracy of 1mm/second (0.0036
kph or 0.0023 mph). That's about…..THIS slow ( he said, not really moving his
hand at all ).
It's Tuesday morning here now -- time for some Venus Express papers. Things have been so quiet about VEX that one member over at UMSF even suggested that we send Venus Express Express to check is Venus Express is still there!
SMART-1 Making an Impact
The SMART-1 lunar impact has been covered fairly well here before -- but Bernard Foing presented some brief highlights during a lunchtime update that I thought would be worth sharing. SMART-1 crashed into the Moon (intentionally) to end its mission just a few weeks ago and so the "mission" is over -- but Foing explained that scientists will now be working even harder on the data they have been collecting. SMART-1 was important in teaching ESA scientists and engineers about solar electric propulsion and gravity assist manoeuvres that will both directly feed forward to the mission design for ESA's BepiColumbo mission to Mercury early in the next decade.
 SMART-1 Impact Site Credit: ESA - C. Carreau |
SMART-1 also saw the first flight of a new generation of miniaturised
instruments that are 5 to 10 times lighter than the current norm. One
of these, a miniaturised camera called AMIE was used in a laser link experiment.
A laser was fired from the island of Tenerife toward the spacecraft some
130,000 kilometres from Earth. Tests from lunar orbit were mentioned but
not described in detail. AMIE was also used to take Earthset and Earthrise
movies in August 2006.
Scientists have used the X-Ray spectrometer onboard to measure elemental composition of the surface, and, using samples returned by the Russian Luna 24 mission, they have been able to confirm the accuracy of the X-Ray spectrometer when observing the Luna 24 landing site and thus propagate the data from the X-Ray spectrometer across the entire surface.
Moving on to the impact itself -- you will all have seen the facts and
figures so I will spare you the details, however the results they have
so far are interesting. The observation of the impact is three fold. Firstly,
the moment of impact itself, about 200 msec in duration -- looking for
spectra within the flash, especially that of the hydrazine fuel that remained
onboard. No details of results were given, but only one facility has so
far reported results of seeing the flash – the 3.6 metre Canada France
Hawaii Telescope ( CFHT ) using its infrared WIRCam using ten second exposures
at a wavelength of 2122nm. The flash itself appears slightly distended
in the direction of travel of the spacecraft at the time of impact. The
second phase is observation of the ejecta, and CFHT caught this well for
a couple of minutes, flying downrange in quite a large area. The final
phase is follow-on observations from later lunar orbiting missions to observe
the actual impact crater and resulting ejecta. The crater is expected to
be around 5 to 10 metres in size and elongated because of the very low
angle of impact.
 Lunar Impact as Seen from Earth The 3.6-meter optical/infrared Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in Hawaii captured this impressive sequence of SMART-1 impact images showing before, during, and after the impact. The impact flash -- which lasted only about 1 millisecond -- may have been caused by the thermal emission from the impact itself or by the release of spacecraft volatiles, such as the small amount of hydrazine fuel remaining on board. Credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corporation |
A delegate asked about the resolution of imagery before the impact, and remarkably,
SMART-1 itself has probably provided the best resolution imagery of the impact
site at around 50 metres per pixel. This means that there will not be particularly
high resolution data from which to compare the post-impact high resolution
data taken by spacecraft such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2008/9.
I asked Foing what plans there were to release SMART-1 data in the way that
Mike Griffin had described the previous day -- a unified data format for all
lunar data to be shared between agencies, countries, and scientists. He said
that they are already beginning to put their data on the European version of
the NASA Planetary Data Service called the PSA. I pushed him for a date, and
he said that over the next 3 months the early data from the mission would go
onto the PSA with the rest following. (insider UMSF joke…I
tried Phil, I tried :). You will just have to keep on waiting you data-addict
you!!)
Tuesday AM saw some Venus Express presentations, and tonight sees a lecture about Venus Express -- so later today I will try and put all of that together.
Venus Express...Express
Recently I mentioned the suggestion that we have heard so little
about what ESA's Venus
Express has been about that we might need to send Venus Express Express
to make sure that Venus Express (VEX) is still there. Whilst, of course,
we know it is -- the amount of coverage and data releases by ESA has been
poor at best -- which is unfortunately fairly typical of most European missions.
Whilst I can report that yes, Venus Express is still working well, unfortunately
this is mainly an engineering and management conference and so little science
is being discussed. However, yesterday I saw three papers and a short lecture
all about VEX and its instruments, so here's what I HAVE found out....
Thomas Schirmann presented "Europe goes to Venus : The Journey of Venus Express" a paper discussing the design, development, launch, cruise, and arrival of Venus Express. As many of you will know, Venus Express was a direct follow on to Mars Express with a request going out in '01 for re-use of the Mars Express platform for another mission. Going to Venus required some major changes, but the spacecraft share the same structure and avionics -- "perhaps not brothers, but cousins" said Schirmann. A heavier cousin though -- 1240 kg compared to the 1223 of Mars Express.
The challenge of going to Venus is twofold. It is a bigger planet than Mars, so it requires more fuel to change orbits, and it is closer to the Sun so you're getting toasted to the tune of 2800 watts per square metre, much higher than Earth, and much MUCH higher than Mars -- around 4 times higher. One instrument requires its sensor to be really cold -- 80 Kelvin -- a real challenge when you're getting that much solar radiation. But – you can get away with smaller solar panels, and in fact not only are the VEX panels smaller than with MEX, but they have solar cells on only half of their surface, the other half being covered in mirrors to try and reflect away as much of the heat as possible -- despite this, the arrays still reach 160 centigrade! You also need more fuel -- 570 kg instead of 455 kg compared to MEX. The building of VEX actually started four months before it was finally approved because the critical pathways that ended with an on time launch could not accommodate waiting those four months before starting the project.
 Comparing Mars Express and Venus Express The solar panels, insulation, and high gain antenna design all changed, but the family resemblance is clear. Credit: ESA |
Truly an pan-European mission, the spacecraft structure was built in Switzerland, the avionics and propulsion outfitted in the UK, the electrical installation in Italy, and the environmental testing in France before being shipped for launch. When it finally arrived at Venus, it conducted a 1251 m/sec burn to enter Venusian orbit, a burn that was just four seconds longer than expected. This put the vehicle into a nine day orbit of 400 x 350,000 kilometres. The final orbit was established by May 7 at 250 x 66,000 kilometres, which, very importantly, is a 24 hour orbit. The Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) was also mentioned. As some of you will know, the PFS failed before arrival at Venus and is currently turned off. Future efforts to further diagnose and try to fix this are planned, but for now, about 1/3 of the wavelengths covered by PFS are being covered by other instruments onboard.
 Veuns Express Before Launch An engineer studies Venus Express before launch -- the solar array design with alternating rows of solar cells and mirrors is visible. Credit: ESA |
The floor was then passed briefly to Andrea Accomazzo who talked about the first
few months of orbital operations from the engineering perspective. Currently,
they are in the nominal science mission which will last two sidereal Venus days.
As mentioned each orbit is 24 hours and this is intentional. Science is done
mainly during the closest 90 minutes of the orbit -- but also further out --
however for the most distant eight hours of the orbit, Venus is visible from
the Ceberos 35-metre European dish in Spain -- so all the data downlink occurs
at the same period of time every day, and communications vary between about 19
and 228 kbps resulting in around two Gbits of data per day. Compare this with
the unfortunate scientists and engineers who work on Mars time, with blacked
out windows and chronic Mars lag as their body clock argues with their job clock.
By making VEX stick to a sensible Earth time, they can not only save the sanity
of their engineers but also save quite a lot of money by needing only one shift
of downlink per day. The other benefit is that the other European deep space
facility -- an identical dish in Western Australia is then always visible to
VEX at the time when they want to uplink new commands. Command lists of around
800 to 1300 time tagged commands are uplinked daily. There is only storage onboard
for a total of 3000 commands, so they uplink every day instead of commanding
several days at a time. Solar Conjunction is coming up in a few weeks time, and
all the science instruments will be turned off until the 9th of November, and
just radio science will be conducted during that period.
Nils Muller then presenting a brief look at some science being conducted by the VIRTIS instrument onboard VEX to try to pull data out from the surface. About 95% of the data in the 990-1050 nm range comes from the surface and this reduces to no surface data in the 1250-1320 nm. BUT -- the 990-1050 range still has an input from the clouds. So, using clever maths, Muller basically stacks a few images from the 990-1050 range, and subtracts the influence of the clouds in the longer wavelengths to hopefully get a temperature map of the surface. Due to blurring by the atmosphere, the resolution of this data is only around 100 kilometres per pixel, however he was able to present some images that showed a variety of surface temperatures from around 720 to 740 Kelvin from data taken out of a mosaic of images collected on the 112 orbit. This data actually quite closely matches the altitude maps of Venus collected by the Magellan mission. So, if it matches the Magellan altitude data so well, what's the point in going to all that trouble? The simple answer -- Volcanic activity. Your average Venusian volcanic lava flow is expected to be perhaps 1000-1500 Kelvin and cover many hundreds of square kilometres, so it should be visible in these 100 kilometre resolution thermal maps. Hopefully, if there is any active volcanic activity going on down under the clouds, then this technique should be able to find it as a change of a more than 5 deg Kelvin in his thermal maps.
I was really looking forward to the evening lecture by Gerhard H Schwelm, the VEX Mission Manager, but unfortunately new information was a bit thin on the ground. Here are the highlights: ASPERA-4 and the VEX Mag have both begun to measure the material being blown off the upper atmosphere by solar wind and SPICAM has started observing stellar and solar occultations. Details on all three were lacking, but one chart showed a clear dust layer being observed by SPICAM between 60 to 80 km altitude. VIRTIS is mapping the cloud activity from the cloud top down to around 20 km altitude, and they can see very complex cloud activity under the S shaped cloud observed first by Pioneer Venus and recently in images released by the VIRTIS team shortly after VOI.
The issue of the failed PFS reared its ugly head once more, and Schwelm said what we have already heard -- they will try to get it working again but for now they are attempting to cover its job with the other instruments. They can't recover the data, but they hope to be able to recover at least some of the science. Questions from the floor were good -- one asking about planetary protection issues for spacecraft. Schwelm said that VEX followed COSPAR regulations, which have no protection rules currently for Venus. Another asked about the distribution of data to the wider scientific community -- Schwelm said that they will follow the ESA rules and distribute the science data after a six month delay via the PSA I mentioned in yesterday's SMART-1 glog entry,
and they are working to keep their data compatible with the NASA PDS. The last
question asked if there were plans to reuse the platform again. Schwelm explained
that when you do this "copy" of a spacecraft design, you have to do it rapidly
without a gap. It's been a year since they finished working on VEX and thus
the heritage is essentially lost -- the teams have changed and it would not
be as cost effective to do the same thing again, and finally, there are other
targets with requirements too different to those of VEX and MEX waiting for
us to explore, so we will have to develop a different platform for them
Not the flood of information I was hoping for, but a trickle is better than a drought.
Mars Renaissance Orbiter
No, not a typo! Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is the renaissance man of Mars exploration -- defined as "a modern scholar who is in a position to acquire more than superficial knowledge about many different interests". A good description of MRO -- with three ticks under ‘high resolution' for special, spectral, and temporal study of Mars. Tuesday saw Jim Graf's presentation about the "Status of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission." Jim is the MRO Project Manager, so it was a packed session in the largest technical session lecture room. This glog-entry is an overview of Jim's paper and MRO in general over the past year or so.
As most of you will know, MRO launched in August 2005 and successfully arrived in orbit in March 2006. This initial orbit was highly elongated -- 400 km by 45,000 km and 35 hours long. Before starting the aerobraking process to reduce that to the final science orbit, four of the six instruments onboard were checked out -- the three cameras HiRISE, CTX, and MARCI all functioned well and those results have been public since late March/early April. The Mars Climate Sounder was the last of the four to be checked out before aerobraking. MCS has a very long and tortured history. It was first designed to be flown on the Mars Observer mission in 1992 which was lost due to a failed launch. A new instrument was built for the Mars Climate Orbiter, but that was also lost. The new version, Mars Climate Sounder, was a considerably lighter and more accurate instrument than the first and was fitted onboard MRO and finally delivered safely into Mars orbit. It was checked out before aerobraking and took an ‘image' of Mars that again, you will have seen previously but also an unreleased image that I thought was fantastic when I saw it in Jim's paper -- a self portrait of the spacecraft science deck!
 MRO Self Portrait The Mars Climate Sounder aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this "self portrait" of the suite of instruments on the science deck. Three other science instruments are visible -- HiRISE, CRISM, and MARCI as well as the Electra UHF relay antenna, one of the two solar panels, and a cluster of thrusters on a corner of the spacecraft. Credit: JPL / NASA |
Not the prettiest image you'll ever see, but I think it's great -- in the
same way I loved the reflection of one of the front Hazcams onboard one of
the Mars Exploration Rovers as seen in the metallic electronics box of the
Microscopic imager and the Mars
Global Surveyor MOC images of Mars Odyssey and Mars Express. Not pretty,
but pretty awesome. The MCS image shows some great detail -- even the spider
that holds the secondary mirror at the top of the optical tube assembly for
HiRISE. The same technique has since been used to partially verify the deployment
of the SHARAD antenna.
After that checkout of four instruments -- the periapsis of the spacecraft
was lowered to "brush" the atmosphere. Aerobraking is HUGE benefit for missions like this, and we can thank the Magellan mission which first tested the technique around Venus nearly 15 years ago. Aerobraking actually saved the spacecraft 1184 m/sec of "delta v" (the
measure of a spacecraft's ability to change its speed) -- or to put it another
way, the orbit insertion burn used 777 kg of fuel and aerobraking effectively
did the work of a further 600 kg of fuel. They had 426 passes at around 100
km altitude over a period of 5 months. This wasn't a cake walk -- the atmosphere
of Mars is a changeable beast and from one aerobraking pass to another they
observed changes in the density of the atmosphere and thus the amount of braking
they received each time around. However, a few weeks ago, the orbit had been
reduced enough to raise the spacecraft out of the upper atmosphere and finish
up the process of putting the spacecraft into its final science orbit of 255
x 320 km using the onboard thrusters.
By mid September, the spacecraft was ready to do two final deployments
and instrument checkouts. Firstly, the SHARAD instrument, a shallow radar
relative of the MARSIS instrument onboard Mars Express. SHARAD has a pair
of antennae that total 10 m in length that "ping" the surface of Mars and listen for the radio reflection from not only the surface but also any subsurface layers. There were a lot of worries about the MARSIS deployment in 2004, and it was delayed significantly. SHARAD would have wobbled around and could well have been damaged if it was deployed before aerobraking, so it was done after aerobraking was finished. It deployed successfully, and Jim was able to show one of the first "traces" by
SHARAD over an area of Mars near to where MARSIS had observed a subsurface
layer under a polar icecap. I can't share the image with you, but it looked
very similar to the MARSIS pass and I am sure the SHARAD team will be releasing
their initial few passes in the next few weeks. SHARAD does not penetrate as
deeply as MARSIS but has better resolution in the depth it can see -- the two
instruments complement each other well and are made by the same team from JPL
and Italy.
Finally, the CRISM spectrometer which is a very high resolution instrument
that samples pixels of around 15-20 metres on the ground in nearly 500 wavelengths
from the visible through to the infrared to identify mineral signatures got
its "first light" moment. It had a cover over its 10-cm wide optical tube
to protect the instrument during aerobraking, but it has now successfully deployed
and has started returning data. Here's the first targeted observation by CRISM,
taken at 1511UT on Sept 29th.
 CRISM "First Light" This CRISM targeted observation of Ius Chasma was acquired on September 29, 2006 and covers an area of 8 by 5 miles (13 by 9 kilometers). Credit: NASA / JPL / JHUAPL / Brown University |
Now that image in itself doesn't look like much -- typical Marsey colours
of a typical Marsey terrain, all a bit beige and boring -- but that's the visible
range. When you go into the infrared, you get a lot more variety and variation,
and you can begin to tell something about the minerals on the ground. The initial
plan is to do a global survey using only about an eighth of the wavelengths,
and then revisit the interesting areas with all 544 wavelengths to get an even
better look at what is on the ground.
Jim was able to present other images from MRO taken from the science orbit within the past week -- MARCI produces daily colour images of the entire planet and is, in effect, a Mars weather satellite. A stunning image at around 1km/pixel of one of the poles was presented, as well as come fantastic images from CTX -- the context imager that comes from the same stable as MARCI: Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS). I hope they will release these soon as they truly are beautiful images which I only wish I could share with you now.
With all this great news, I was particularly disappointed to see that Malin Space Science Systems have stopped doing their daily image releases from the MOC camera on Mars Global Surveyor. MOC has been producing extraordinary images of Mars for nine years and has revolutionised our understanding of the planet, and it's a pity that at the same time its contribution might be overshadowed by a bigger more modern spacecraft, it's continuing contribution to our understanding of Mars may become overlooked and it will not get the credit it deserves because of the tight budget the mission is running on. I thought it right to show what the MOC team consider one of their favourite images as a firm doff of the cap to all that MGS and MOC have shown us and will continue to show us about Mars.
 Fine Layering in Martian Crater Subframe of a Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera image of very fine layering in a crater floor in western Arabia Terra. Image approx 1.5 km on a side and 1.5 m/pixel. Read more about this image. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS |
What I CAN share with you -- and in fact I am sure most of you have been abusing your internet connection in downloading these already -- are the utterly astonishing images from HiRISE. Jim showed a few bits and pieces from HiRISE now that it is in its final science orbit. I'm just going to show you my two favourite little pieces of HiRISE imagery from the first dozen or so that have been released so far, but I urge to run, not walk, to the HiRISE website and look at all of them for yourself. Both of these are just 100 x 100 metres on the surface -- about the size of a couple of football/soccer/athletics fields side by side. The first is a 50cm/pixel image (which I've blown up to 200%) of a segment of the Cerberus Fossae rift system. The rift itself is 300 metres across and 90 metres deep -- this is just part of its northern edge. The dynamic range of the camera really shows here -- look how well it can still see fine detail in the shadow of the cliff wall -- and we have incredibly fine details of a dune system at the bottom -- dunes about 2 metres across -- the sort of size of many of the ripples and dunes we've seen at Meridiani Planum.
 HiRise Examines Cerberus Fossae Small 100 x 100 metre subframe of an early Mars Reconnaissance Oriber HiRISE image of a segment of the Cerberus Fossae rift system. Credit: JPL / NASA / U. of Ariz HiRISE Team |
The second subframe is the full-fat, double espresso, make mine a double, 25cm/pixel resolution that HiRISE can manage. This is actually part of the very first science orbit HiRISE image taken of Ius Chasma, part of the Valles Marineris network and target of that CRISM image I showed you above. Again – 100 x 100 metres, but a genuine 25cm/pixel (not resized). I picked this one because it really shows the resolving power of HiRISE. See the bright boulder with a shadow on the right hand side of the image about a third of the way from the bottom? That boulder is about 1.2 metres across and is casting a shadow 2 metres long. So why do I care about that boulder? That shadow is about the same size as a Mars Exploration Rover would appear from HiRISE -- an MER is approx 1.6 x 2.3 metres seen from above. When HiRISE images an MER, we should even be able to see a little bit of structure. The MGS MOC team did an awesome job of capturing both rovers several times as a dark pixel or two -- but that was more of a point on a map rather than a feature we can identify and relate to -- perhaps even a shadow that will show the camera mast and quite probably some wheel tracks as well.
 HiRise's Close Eye on Mars Small 100 x 100 meter subframe of an early Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE image showing meter-scale boulders on the floor of Ius Chasma. Credit: JPL / NASA / U. of Ariz HiRISE Team |
I can't wait to see places I know so well -- Gusev crater and the Columbia Hills,
Meridiani Planum, Endurance Crater, Eagle Crater, VICTORIA CRATER for goodness
sake. That first subframe the HiRISE team released covered an area of only 600
x 400 metres and whilst putting my jaw in the full dropped position, I realised
that Victoria Crater would not even fit into that field of view. Every image
is going to be a little adventure of exploration scrolling around the terrain
at a level that is one can relate to more easily.
Today ( Wednesday ) lunchtime my "not-stalking-Jim-Graf" plan paid off and I resorted to basically ambushing him as he was walking through the central lobby of the conference venue with two very large tubes under an arm. I wanted to ask two things….could I grab that great MCS image from his paper and include it here (he said yes…thank
you Jim) and also, I wanted to know how much of that bandwidth I talked about
yesterday is occupied by HiRISE images. I automatically thought, as I'm sure
many of you might, that a camera that can take an image of 1,200 Megapixels
very easily would be the big fat greedy instrument of the payload, stealing
all the bandwidth and leaving the others to pick up whatever it left. However,
this is far from the truth! SHARAD and CTX are about 20% of the data budget
each and for the top-honours it's a close call between HiRISE and CRISM, with
CRISM probably taking just a little bit more than HiRISE -- 25 or so percent
each -- MARCI and MCS consume the rest of the budget, very little compared
to the others. They were to be the primary payload for the lost Climate Orbiter,
so it just goes to highlight how big a jump in downlink capacity MRO is when
the primary two instruments of a mission find themselves very much the little
guys of this new mission. MARCI and MCS will, perhaps for that reason, be left
running during the next few weeks as solar conjunction brings this initial
exciting glut of data to a close until the science campaign starts in earnest
in November.
For those who like analogies, solar conjunction is when the Sun gets in
the way of the line of sight between Mars and Earth so using radio communications
for around two weeks at that time is a little like trying to whisper across
a loud dance floor…you're just not going to be heard. For that reason, all spacecraft on Mars (or indeed anywhere when they experience conjunction) tend to be put into a quiescent mode to look after themselves whilst they're out of touch. As a Mars enthusiast, the second half of October will be a fortnight of cold turkey with nothing from Spirit or Opportunity OR our new big shiny orbiter. But with the images we already have and whatever other images they reveal at two NASA press conferences I've seen scheduled on NASA TV for Friday and Monday (these are a must see and I will try and report on Friday's before heading home from Valencia) -- I think I'll manage. Under his arm, Jim had a print out of just ¼ of that first science orbit image printed out about 1.5 x 1.5 metres. I helped him find somewhere to hang it up as the conference organisers were not being too helpful -- but they should have been…all afternoon there were two or three people just staring at it for minutes and minutes and minutes. HiRISE has been described as "the people's camera" as
they intend to release most of the images quite quickly onto the web and even
schedule a few observations a month based on public suggestions -- something
pioneered by MGS MOC.
So far, the people very much approve. My advice is to buy stock in hard
drive manufacturers because if MRO can last as long as MGS…we'll all need
much MUCH bigger hard drives.
Searching for ET Inside a Fish Tank
Yes -- I did take yesterday afternoon off. Technically, I'm on holiday from my "day job" this week and sitting in technical sessions, hot auditoriums, and a busy press room from 0830 to 1830 every day kind of takes it out of you, whereas a holiday is supposed to put it back in you ( whatever 'it' is ) - so I decided that I would abandon the conference (and you, dear reader) for the afternoon. After spending a good 15 minutes with Jim Graf yesterday – I'd run out of ways to go 'oo' and 'ahh' and 'wow' at the printout just outside the press room (which has now vanished) and Helen, her mum and I set off to ' L'Oceanografic' – basically a Spanish Sea World. There was the usual aquaria, great underwater tunnels, a dolphin show etc etc. The highlight for me was the Arctic zone ( which was nicely refrigerated…I don't like the heat ) and in particular one of its two resident Beluga Whales. These things are big. I don't have a whale sized tape measure but I'd put it somewhere between "you would need a big fish tank for that!" and "not as big as a killer whale" – if you ask Google, you'll be told it's 4 to 5 metres and about 1.5 tonnes. Slightly larger and heavier then, than our Ford Focus rental car. I couldn't see a name – so I called her 'Whaley'. Perhaps not the most imaginative name but it worked and she clearly liked it. I say 'she', but I don't actually know – she seemed too pretty to be a bloke. I've probably offended a lot of marine biologists by not identifying the poor thing properly – but how could you not love a face like this (the whale…not me)
 New Friend Beluga whale and your guest blogger discuss the price of fish in L'Oceanografic at the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias. Credit: Helen Maffin |
At this point, I am sure you're thinking "what the heck is he going on about…he's
lost it….it must be the heat -- whales, fish -- this is The Planetary Society" --
stick with me here. The Planetary Society has funded some work in SETI, both traditional
radio based observations and now the new
optical facility.
I can't say I know much about SETI -- I'm not what you would call a big fan,
but I can understand that for some people, it's a huge issue and I have no
problem with some of my Planetary Society membership going towards it. But
what if we do find ET at the end of the phone, or in our back garden asking
for directions to the UN? Believe it or not, amongst the deep space communications,
propulsion, launch vehicles, systems engineering, and other highly interesting
papers being presented at IAC here in Valencia, there were two sessions dedicated
to SETI. Both sessions clashed with other sessions I really wanted to see so
I'm just citing the papers presented here, but how could you not love "Large-size
Message Construction for ETI: Aristotelian Syllogisms" I
can barely pronounce two of those words!
Planetary Society members will be interested in "Initial Results from Harvard All-sky Optical SETI" -- firmly in the "you made it happen" category. The fully automated search is due to start this Autumn (any time now I would guess), but they reported their results from three days of testing this April. Paper author Andrew Howard describes the observations: "These
observations served several purposes: they
tested the instrument, encouraged the development of observing procedures,
and, because of the sky coverage and sensitivity of the all-sky instrument,
these small number of initial observations comprise the most extensive search
for pulsed optical extraterrestrial transmitters ever conducted." Their sensitivity
is down to 95 photons per square metre in a 3 nanosecond period. The final
all sky survey will infact cover 64-75% of the sky, at a sensitivity of 17
photons per square metre in 5 nanoseconds, take 2700 observations covering
108 objects with between 48 and 140 seconds of observation time per object.
All this will take a total of 1350 to 1800 hours of observation time. Given
that they got about 6 hours per night in the April test phase, that's something
like 8 to 12 months of observations to get the full sky survey they were looking
for. Will they find ET? I don't know. But with that much observation time with
a new and fascinating facility, they'll find SOMETHING interesting no matter
what is out there.
 The Optical SETI Telescope The fully operational Optical SETI telescope, showing the 72'' primary mirror and the back of the 36'' secondary mirror. The sopisticated electronic "camera" is in the metal boxes on the right, next to grad students Andrew Howard and Curtis Moad. Credit: Harvard University/Paul Horowitz |
So what does this have to do with Whaley? Well, what if we DO find ET? There
were papers presented for that as well "Rules for First Contact: Legal and Policy
Issues Arising from Establishing and Maintaining Communications with Extraterrestrials" "Other
Worlds, Other Gods" and even "A Semantic 'Engine' for Universal Translation" by
John Elliott from Leeds Metropolitan University back in the UK, but reading
that paper, I felt there was a big gap in his study. We can communicate with
Chimps, they can even use a form of sign language to tell you that they basically
want a banana. Some elephants have been taught to use a form of currency. They
paint pictures and get given big tokens for each one, then they can give the
tokens back for treats.
Perhaps we should be applying our research in communicating with other civilisations
to the other civilisations here on Earth. Perhaps limiting it to mammals makes
it to 'local' to be of use, it's a start. If we can develop a system that might
be able to understand a chimp, a donkey, even the clicking squeaking of Dolphins
I heard at the show yesterday and the brief conversation I had with Whaley.
Yes, we communicated. I said "What about the price of fish, eh? A disgrace isn't it?". Whaley nodded and gesticulated in disgust with a front flipper. Then I got out my press pass for the conference and she was FASCINATED by this thing -- this 1.5 ton whale sat 18 inches in front of me following my hand around as I moved my press pass up and down, left and right. Then Helen arrived and Whaley looked at her. The Whaley looked back at me. Yes, the family dog will follow a bone or a ball, but this seemed somehow better. Maybe it was the water, maybe it was the smell of fish, maybe it was the heat…but
for a moment, I found intelligence inside a big fish tank.
If you are wondering "things must be slow over there" -- yes -- Thursday morning was a bit thin on really juicy stuff. Lots of interesting things here and there, but not the sort of thing you would really want to read about, nothing I could really write about with any confidence. If you're wondering what IS going on and want to read more – you
can visit the server that hosts all the papers. Panic not, normal service will be resumed later!
PS -- Whaley says Hi!
Education, Education, Education
Thursday afternoon is the poster session, but most of the main themes
are ones I have already covered to some extent. However, earlier today,
there was an interesting session just across the hall from the Press Room
about Educational projects and getting students involved in Maths, Science,
and Engineering. I'm going to focus on three projects that I found particularly
interesting.
Manola Romero has been working with two engineering schools near Toulouse in France for ten years and discussed the results of looking back over two years of educational projects to see what the students feel they got out of the process. They have been building payloads to fly by balloon to the near space environment in a project called SOPRANO. The project itself finished some time ago but the lessons learnt are quite interesting. Engineering students built a cube of about 50 cm on a side that flew to 30 km altitude by balloon and experienced the near space environment and were later recovered after spending several hours at this altitude. In asking the students to look back -- amazingly what they seem to have most enjoyed from the experience is the teamwork rather than the engineering, and learning how to manage a project was more valuable that the data they returned. Most considered participation in the project important enough to put on their CV and many even considered it a more important entry than some of their qualifications. Unfortunately money, as with so many projects, was lacking, and so late last decade, the project had to be ended.
As one door closes however….Guerric Pont presented his poster about the education possibilities for ESA / Arianspace's new VEGA launch vehicle which will complete the Ariane / Soyuz / Vega family for large, medium, and small sized payloads. The first flight is scheduled for the end of 2007, but Guerric suggested it would be another 6 to 12 months later than that. Whenever it may occur, that first flight will not include an actual payload, but a dummy payload put into a low polar orbit
 Vega Model A 1/20th scale model of the Vega launch vehicle at the Agencia Spaziale Italiana pavilion. Credit: Doug Ellison |
Rather that throw away the opportunity for a risky -- but hopefully successful
-- first flight, ESA and Arianespace have decided to fly an education suite
onboard the dummy payload structure. Part of this will be a pseudo professional
payload called MORE -- Modulated Optical Retroreflector Experiment. A high
power laser from a facility in Tenerife will be aimed at the dummy stage, and
the retroreflectors will receive, modulate, and return that signal to test
low power optical communications. The second half of the payload is a class
of project that I am a huge fan of: Cubesats. I was amazed when I first saw
a communications satellite up close in Stevenage near London -- it was the
size of a bus (a standard NASA unit of measure -- School Bus) -- but Cubesats
amazed me even more. 10 x 10 x 10 cm, and no more than 1 kg. Amazingly, university
students and their tutors are putting together fully working spacecraft of
that size….and they WORK….sometimes
 Cubesat NCube2 An image of Cubesat NCube2 before integration into SSETI Express. Credit: ESA/SSETI Team |
Perhaps NCube2 was a bad example as it was launched as part of another mission
and never properly deployed, but that is a fully working spacecraft with power,
communications, data, and command handling. No, I'm not talking about the large
black thing off on the left...just that little cube by the engineer's hands.
They are a high risk project as the Cubesat
homepage will tell you, but the University of Tokyo have had great success
with XI-IV which
amazingly has been working for more than three years and still takes little
thumbnail images of Earth and sends them back. The VEGA dummy payload will
have two P-PODS -- containers than can hold three Cubesats -- for a total of
six complete fully functioning spacecraft. They're currently going through
the selection process, but dozens of universities around the world are building
these things and they are a great way to get students involved in a real project
that doesn't cost millions of dollars. Cubesats are hardly two a penny...I've
seen figures of around $10,000 - 100,000, depending on the amount of industry
support and the launch vehicle used. But as with the SOPRANO project, the success
is just getting it to the launch pad -- the teamwork and the management of
the project mean mission success if you finish the thing and it passes a mission
readiness review.
The final post in this session was from Trond Krøvel about the next
major project for the SSETI group. SSETI is the Student Space Exploration and
Technology Initiative, a European project that could be considered the next
step up from a Cubesat. Not 10x10x10 cm and 1 kg, their first project, called
SSETI Express, was washing machine sized (another NASA unit of measurement
as used for the Deep Impact Impactor spacecraft) and about 65 kg. It actually
gave a piggy-back ride to three Cubesats which it deployed before it failed
due to an electrical system failure. It was designed, built, and was to be
controlled by students from all over Europe.
 SSETI Express SSETI Express, a European student spacecraft launched in 2005. Credit: ESA/SSETI Team |
However, that's LAST year, and now not only is the SSETI team working on a
new Earth orbiting spacecraft (ESEO -- European Students Earth Orbiter) with
250 students working away on the spacecraft for a 2008 launch -- but Krøvel
and his colleagues / fellow students are now working on ESMO...yes, they're
designing a lunar orbiter. ESMO will be about 80 x 80 x 80 cm and a little
under 200 kg. The designs are still ongoing, but they intend to have a narrow
angle and wide angle pair of cameras to observe not only the Moon but also
Earth in the Apollo 8 Earth-Rise style. And -- possibly the ultimate Cubesat
mission -- they intend to carry a Cubesat to lunar orbit and deploy it once
there and, using radio tracking of the Cubesat, will do gravity mapping of
the Moon. Their ultimate goal, and indeed the original goal of the SSETI program
was to land, control, and do science with a lunar rover. Huge ambitions for
a bunch of students (a class of individual that, in the UK at least, is most
well known for watching daytime TV and eating biscuits) but with the completion
of SSETI-Express, you have to give them the credit they deserve and, step by
step, they might just make it to the Moon.
As some projects like SOPRANO close, others start up and the range, number, and availability of student programs for direct involvement in spaceflight has never been better. If you're a student of any age, ask your teachers if they know of any projects locally, and if they can't find something, then get online and find something yourself and get involved. It could be anything from doing the press releases for a K-12 payload under a balloon all the way up to building a spacecraft flying to the Moon.
Hit Me With Your Rocket Stick
Friday morning, just one more technical session to go. This afternoon there
is very little happening at the conference so I'm going to "do" the science
museum, which is currently about 5 metres above my head in the rest of this
building, before I tune in to NASA TV at about 5 pm local time to watch an
interesting news conference (which I will then report on before bringing my
conference reporting to an end).
In response to the Vision for Space Exploration, two launch vehicles have been proposed and are currently in the early design stage. The final technical session included a series of presentations on Ares 1 -- the Space Shuttle solid rocket motor derived "Stick" launch vehicle for the Crew Exploration Vehicle. This is way outside my comfort zone of knowledge and not really typical Planetary Society subject matter but let's face it -- whatever replaces the shuttle is big news for any space enthusiast, and so whatever puts that replacement into orbit has got to be an important development. I took the normal NASA Ares 1 publicity image and re-did all the descriptions and added lines to split up the various sections I describe below.
 Ares 1 Ares 1 Crew Launch Vehicle split into its various components. Credit: NASA |
Tom Williams was first up and talked about the first stage -- the upgraded
solid rocket motor called the RSRMV, Reusable Solid Rocket Motor V, the V standing
for the five segments it has instead of four. He highlighted the changes from
the current Space Shuttle Solid motor. One would automatically think that the
extra segment would be at the top (well, I did) but of course, the top contains
all the avionics and the hardware to bring the stage back down to the ground,
such as the drogue chutes and the main chutes etc. The new segment is actually
the middle one.
Getting a thrust profile (i.e., a variation in the amount of thrust that rocket produces over time) is fairly easy with liquid fuel rockets -- you just open the taps a little more, or close them off a little more. A solid motor just burns though, so what you have to do is change the shape of the solid propellant inside the motor. It is ignited at the top and burns from the top to the bottom. The four segment version has 11 fins in the top segment, giving a large surface area and thus a lot of thrust as a lot of propellant burns very quickly. The five segment design will have 12 fins for even more thrust. To allow for more thrust, the nozzle at the aft end will had a slightly larger throat to stop the exhaust choking inside the motor. Not long into flight however, the vehicle will be going very quickly, with still a reasonable atmosphere, and there is a point where the dynamic pressure reaches the limit set by the designers (aviators would know this as indicated air speed, but it's the point where the vehicle is getting the most force from the air it's travelling through). That limit is 800 psf (pounds per square foot), and the rocket engineers want to get as close as they can to that figure to get the most performance from the vehicle without exceeding it and stressing the vehicle too much. To stop then exceeding this limit the middle part of the motor is designed to burn a little slower and provide a little less thrust.
Once past this point, the limiting factor is the squishy organic matter at the top of the rocket -- the astronauts on board. They don't want the vehicle to exceed 3.8 G of acceleration, but by this point, the rocket has burned a lot of its propellant and is thus quite a lot lighter than when it was sitting on the pad. If it still had the high thrust from the beginning of the launch, then it would exceed that 3.8 G figure and be very uncomfortable for the crew. To combat this, the fuel burns slower, producing less and less thrust all the way to the point at which it burns out.
At this point, I feel the need to apologise for the series of NASA engineers who used feet, pounds, and inches all morning. At a major international engineering orientated conference, I would consider that more than a little embarrassing, but I am just quoting the figures that we have been given. You would think that a new vehicle would be the perfect opportunity for the engineers to bring themselves kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but it seems they want to stick to these so called 'English' Units (which no English engineer at this conference would ever dream of using today). I'm trusting that you're a bright bunch and can figure these numbers out for yourselves. As a guide, Space Ship One reached an altitude of just over 100 km and as its registration number (N328KF) suggests -- 100 km is about 328,000 ft.
At separation, the vehicle will be at 194,300 ft some 130 seconds after launch and travelling at 6,640 ft/sec. They then have to get all that energy of a fairly hefty upper stage at a high altitude and a high speed to land gently on the ocean below. This process will start with the firing of some tumble motors designed to introduce the same sort of tumbling that the current motors experience by virtue of the fact that their separation motors fire sideways. 12 seconds later, already at 232,000 ft, the motor will have rotated 180 degrees (facing backwards) and the frustum and interstage that connected the first stage to the second stage will be separated. Travelling under its own kinetic energy, the stage will reach a height of 325,000 ft (just shy of 100km) and then settle into an oscillating plummet to a height of 15,000 ft where the thick atmosphere will have slowed it to 638 ft/sec and the small pilot chute will fire. By 4,400 ft and travelling under the drogue chute, it will be doing only 350 ft/sec and the impact, 7 mins 45 sec after ignition, will be at only 69 ft/sec -- slower than current shuttle SRBs but a speed that carries the same total kinetic energy of the current SRB impact.
Lawrence D. Huebner has been working as part of a team looking at the aerodynamics during launch, the aerodynamic loads on the first stage during decent, and the aerodynamic loads on the upper stage during its entry and break-up. So far they have run more than 1500 wind tunnel tests with seven different models in four different facilities across the U.S., and also lots of CFD (Computation Fluid Dynamics) simulations to calculate measurements that would be hard to take via traditional methods. They have been trying to establish the aerodynamics of the vehicle in the Mach 0.5 to Mach 5 range.
 Preparing for Wind Tunnel Test A model of the Ares 1 launch vehicle is prepared for a supersonic wind tunnel test. Credit: NASA / MSFC / D.Higginbotham |
He presented charts that compared the wind tunnel data to the CFD data, and the three different CFD codes they have been using to one another. They all matched exceedingly well, so they have high confidence in the fidelity of the CFD simulations. One anomaly was detected in some wind-tunnel models however. The Launch Abort System sits above the Orion vehicle and its motors stand proud on the mast on which they sit. Behind this component and in front of the Crew module, they noticed a flickering in some wind-tunnel images of "flow popping" -- a collapsing and expanding shockwave at about Mach 1.6. This only occurred at an angle of incident to the oncoming air of a few degrees, and it is unclear if it would occur at full scale (these models were between 1 and 1.5% scale) but they have been looking at the issue for the last few months and a redesign of the LAS geometry may be required. Presenting on behalf of an absent author (Jim Snoddy), Huebner then talked about the J2-X motor that will be used on the upper stage and also the Earth departure stage for lunar missions.
 Test Firing of J-2 Engine A J-2 engine being test fired in the 1960s. A derivative of this engine -- the J-2X -- will power the upper stage of Ares 1 and the Earth Departure Stage for future lunar exploration. Credit: NASA |
This whole stack need to have the ability to "roll" to get on its proper trajectory,
and the first stage doesn't have that capacity so it is being included within
the second stage. The original J2 was from the 1960s as part of the upper stages
for the Saturn 1B and Saturn V and has been iterated just about continuously
since then with various components including turbo machinery from the development
of the X-33 linear aerospike engine. The requirements for the modern derivative
have moved on. It has to be able to loiter on orbit for three months in case
of technical or weather delays when waiting for the second half of the 1.5 launch
mission design. At first, there were plans to use a space shuttle main engine
for this upper stage but for reasons of in-flight restart, the J2-X was seen
as a better option. Huebner said that the upper stage engine team have gone and
visited "Apollo-Era 'grey beards'" to learn about the design challenges from
back in the 60s. Two versions of the J-2X will be developed -- a 294,000 lb
thrust version and a J-2XD 274,000 lb thrust version for risk reduction. A
first fire of a full up test engine is expected in 2010.
Now time for Doug's final thoughts: NASA did something good by funding SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler for development of launch vehicles and cargo/crew carriers to the ISS in the COTS program (and I'm not saying that just because I bumped into someone from RPK at a Tapas bar last night). I look at this great big launch vehicle, the huge amount of work going into clinging with a white-knuckle grip on to Shuttle heritage hardware -- hardware which will be more than 30 years old come the first launch of Ares 1, I see all this work going into a new upper stage being developed, lengthy and expensive development processes, a very expensive series of flight tests, and I can't help thinking...wouldn't it just be easier to use a human rated heavy variant Atlas V or Delta IV? Is NASA going about the VSE in the best possible way or in the way that pleases the most politicians?
I See You, Baby
Did you get the not so subtle hint from my MRO blog entry a few days ago…Rover sized rocks….Meridiani sized ripples. I'll cut to the chase… THIS is why. Run, don't walk, to the HiRISE website to look at this stuff. Here's a description of what you're seeing:
 Credit: NASA / JPL / HiRISE Team |
 Credit: NASA / JPL / HiRISE Team |
This is the imagery we all know would get taken at some point, and we thought it might be quite good. But I don't think anyone was hoping or expecting to see images this good, this soon. 29.7 cm/pixel is just ARHHGGH resolution. Infact -- the resolution of the orbiter looking down to the rover on one side of the crater is better than the resolution the rover can manage of the other side of the crater. The press conference is repeating on NASA TV and I think I'll go "wow" just as much the second time around as I did the first. You can even see the shadow of the mast that carries Pancam, Navcam, and the Mini-TES mirror -- a mast that's only about 15 cm across. The rest of the crater just looks spectacular -- the dunes, the outcrops, the rock falls and boulders at the bottom of the slopes -- I've picked out a few nice bits and highlights where they came from…
 HiRise Looks at Victoria Crater Victoria Crater as observed by the HiRISE instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA / JPL / HiRISE Team |
What about the view from the ground. Well, a few hours before that image was
taken, Opportunity drove to that location and took a Navcam Panorama….
 Opportunity Navcam Spots Victoria Crater Rim Navcam Panorama from Opportunity on Sol 957. Credit: JPL / NASA / Cornell Processing: Doug Ellison using data from the Midnight Mars Browser |
If you look at the two images, you can identify the same small outcrops
of rock in both the HiRISE image and the Navcam image.
I'm not going to attempt any analysis -- I think the images say all the words they need to, but I will add this: Alfred McEwen, Steve Squyres, and Jim Bell were all on the panel for the Press Conference over in Washington, and all three have the same philosophy when it comes to the imagery taken by their instruments...they chuck it on the web within a few days or even a few hours. Exploring Mars is an adventure, and because of the data that Steve, Jim, and Alfred put on the web so quickly and freely, it is an adventure that all of us can share in. Not every mission does this, but a fair few do -- SOHO imagery has been going online for years, as has the imagery from the MODIS instrument onboard Aqua and Terra (which Emily has often used in this blog) Cassini's cameras do the same. Not every mission does this, but they should be encouraged to do so -- there is a benefit that extends beyond normal outreach. It brings people into the mission, people can see their taxes doing good work every single day and ride along with the scientists and engineers, as together we explore the world, the solar system, and our place in the universe. If you want to join in, it's all out there -- you just have to want to be a part of the adventure.
 Darkness Falls Over the IAC 2006 Conference Venue in Valencia Credit: Doug Ellison |
This is my last Glog entry, as tomorrow and Sunday I'll be travelling back
to Blighty after a week here in Valencia. It's been an absolute privilege to
take a week of the Guest Blogger schedule, and I wore my press pass with a
lot of pride over the past 5 days. I hope you've enjoyed at least some of what
I've had to say, and if you didn't…well, it was only a week wasn't it! From
Valencia I bid you gracias y buena noche!
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