2020 Hindsight

Ring ring ring

So there I was, on the web, waxing eloquent about how those boys and girls at JPL do such good work. I'm several paragraphs into a kinda musing-piece, and the browser crashes, sending all my composed text to file heaven. oh well.

Got up this morning to see the ring images start showing up at 5am live. Rings. Ring images, Ring Scientists and Ring Lore... are phrases that come out of this morning's broadcast of the first images sent back.

Last night's news conference about the retro burn: Q: what would have happened if the retro burn hadn't gone off? A: We'd've had a fly-by instead of an orbit insertion and Cassini would've eventually left the solar system.

Had a conversation with Doc M in which I exclaim that "You guys at JPL make it look so easy!!!" to which he shakes his head, and exclaims over the years of work and effort that went into it beforehand... he speaks with that burdened conviction of one mired in planning and engineering. As if to say, 'this is the stage where we work all the problems that later result in the triumphal high-fives... and I'm in the thick of it.' I wonder if the sheer accuracy to retro-burn cutoff within one minute of predict lays a bit heavy on him. After all before it got sent to Saturn, someone built it, and before someone built it, it was a description in an engineering document, debated in meetings and raked over in design reviews. Doc M's particular instrument, bound for an earth-orbiting satellite, is much smaller than what's 1.6 billion km away from us, beaming back data and images that fill me with awe. But the work to get engines and sensors built so so well that it cuts off within one minute of predicted burn time, putting the satellite in an orbit period that's within a day of predicted length, all occured years and years ago; it's the kind of work he's doing right now. And no, no, it's not easy at all.

Hellllllllllllllllo, Saturn!!

New vocabulary: SOI: Saturn Orbit Insertion. Here's hoping that SOI is not equal to SOL.

I'm seeing familiar views in mission control. feel a little better knowing what, for instance "fault" is (the one that tracks when faults happen and what they are).

Not really blogging it. (No one's really at this site) Just watching it and enjoying it via IM (auntialias)

I keep hearing them talk about "saturnian" which sounds like the wine: sauterne. Maybe that's the appropriate wine to drink for this event!

More thoughts: Doc M is all on pins and needles today/tonight. He was on the lab and went home to his house where the local cable channel did NOT display NASA TV (heh. Inadvertantly typed in NADA TV...) Don't know why the cable company dropped it; it serves the neighborhood right near JPL... you'd think.... So he managed to get the NASA TV webcast. earlier he said that radar plays a much larger role in Cassini than it did with Mars (for Mars, radar played a very short but significant role in EDL: the radar locks onto the ground to tell the distance in order to determine when to fire the retro rockets). Radar is going to be used to find out more about the topography of some surface... below clouds/vapor.

There's a communication blockout till 5 or 6 minutes after the hour. I'm sure that the collective water pressure at JPL dropped a bit.... and it's a good time to fix a little smackerel of something.

CASSINI IS CAPTURED IN ORBIT!! Yeehaw!

Signal returning.... as expected. 9:05 (after this they have but 1.5 hours owrth of burn fuel in tank).

Cassini Orbit Insertion

June 30, 6pm pacific time, the live coverage begins. (Doc M said that when he rode his bike onto the lab today [tues] there was a tent and signs saying, "Media do not go past this point.") So it's gonna be SHOWTIME! for JPL once again. The nailbiter event includes a 96-minute retrorocket burn before orbit insertion.

Cassini's home page at JPL

webcast/broadcast schedule (beginning from 9am)

A Guide to Saturn Orbit Insertion: June 30 (All times are approximate and listed in Pacific Time)
NASA TV/webcast coverage begins at 6:30 pm. [click more for the full schedule]

The X-prize report from Mojave Spaceport

No, I didn't go. But I watched the landing on TV live (I console myself with that). Rand Simberg was there. See his several posts about it. And follow his links to other eyewitness discussion.

Grant Henninger was there, too. With pix.

And Donald Larson said he was gonna be there (w/ connections, ooh la la, he's a friend of Burt Rutan's son). So Don, spill! How was it? (not here, tho, I'm in the midst--heh, I originally typed 'mist' and it's fitting--of site conversion and any comment will prolly not survive. How about on your site?)

Cassini flies by Phoebe (and its radar works!)

The main link is to the AP story, here's the L.A. Times (reg required) story.

[AP] The plutonium-powered spacecraft, which is carrying 12 science instruments and a probe, came within about 1,285 miles of the dark moon Phoebe on Friday, officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.

The $3.3 billion spacecraft pointed its instruments at the moon, then turned to point its antenna toward Earth. Its data reached NASA's Deep Space Network on Saturday morning.

And I have it on good authority that the on-board radar works. The instrument works, the data came back, and were analyzed successfully.

The remote sensing instruments can calculate measurements from a great distance. This set includes both optical and microwave sensing instruments including cameras, spectrometers, radar and radio. [Read More]

As shown by the above list of instrumens, there's more than radar aboard... I just get radar-related news firsthand. When I attended the Radar Section Christmas party last December, the Section Manager had this to say about 2004: "Charles Elachi [JPL Director] says there are three priorities for JPL in 2004: MER, MER, and Cassini." So the first two went swimmingly, and we're onto the third.

The hardware was built before the Oct 1997 launch, so congratulations are going out to people for work done close to a decade ago. (Talk about delayed gratification!)

The Cassini website at JPL

Opportunity's going in!! (to Endurance Crater)

Thanks to Asa and Martian Soil for links to these stories.

JPL/NASA Press release (4 June) about the Okay To Go In Yesterday's (8 June) press release has more on the strategy.

The strategy for driving on the crater's inner slope is to keep wheels on rock surfaces instead of sand, said JPL rover-mobility engineer Randy Lindemann. The team ran trials with a test rover on a surface specifically built to simulate Karatepe's surface conditions. "The tests indicate we have a substantial margin of safety for going up a rocky slope of 25 degrees," Lindemann said. Opportunity's observations from the rim at the top of the planned entry route show a slope of less than 20 degrees.

Space.com: Wintering on the Red Planet. A recap of Spirit near Columbia Hills, Opportunity about to dive into Endurance Crater, and Wintering over.

I asked a question about "deep sleep" at the CalTech Mars presentation at the beginning of May. Mark Adler said that Earth's August and September are the months where winter sets in on Mars... the reduced hours of sunlight, and the lower sun in the sky means that sunlight is glancing off the solar panels about at 30 - 40 degree angle (rather than, say, a 90-degree directly overhead sort of angle). Also, Mars is farthest from the sun. The rovers can't get much of a charge to solar panels in that condition, so the engineers will put them into a kind of hibernation. Dust has been accumulating on the panels all this time, of course. The sun will move back as the Martian winter passes, but the dust will continue to accumulate.

Also, Pasadena Star News: Salt deposits (found by Spirit) shed light on planet's history. yes, and Opportunity's begun the journey in.

Although there is the possibility that Opportunity will not be able to climb back out of Endurance Crater, Naderi said, "If you want to study history, there are worse places to get stuck than a library,' which is virtually what the crater is to scientists.

Venus Crosses Sun

What we couldn't see on the West Coast. The Crossing of Venus.

Venus makes two passes across the sun, eight years apart, every 122 years; the next one will be in 2012. As the sun is 30 times bigger, the planet is barely visible through special dark glasses.

(yeah, so you can't see the Venus Crossing Guard, an elderly person wearing a fluorescent vest, hold up the 8-sided stop sign to halt oncoming traffic during the time Venus skipped across the Sun's surface. We have it on good authority that the Venus Crossing Guard was well-supplied with ultra-high SPF sunblock.)

More from the Exploratorium. The next one is on June 6, 2012. But at what time? I guess I got 8 years to find out.

Up for "shall we do it?" discussions: go to Mojave for The Big Flight on 21st

This article discusses logistics.

Thousands of spectators are expected to flock to Mojave Airport for the dawn takeoff, which will occur with the red-white-and-blue craft slung under a carrier aircraft -- the same way NASA sent its X-15 rocket planes into space in the 1960s.

...

The June 21 flight will be open to the public, but Mojave Airport officials plan to charge vehicles to park on the grounds. Parking fees are expected to be $10 per car and $40 per recreational vehicle.

Information about the event call be found at Scaled.com . [except that the link to page with particulars is broken right now. LATER: It's fixed.]

The parking fee will help to offset the expected $300,000 it will take to accommodate the public for the flight.

Spitzer: a new baby planet (image by Bryce)

By baby, they mean young-- less than a million years old. One of the better parts about this story is looking at the image accompanying the article and seeing that it credits R Hurt. That's Robert Hurt, an astronomer who's been a talented Brycer from way back.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found signs of a planet less than one million years old, which could be the youngest planet detected.

The possible planet is in the constellation Taurus, 420 light-years from Earth. One light-year is 9.5 trillion kilometres – the distance light travels in a year.

Well, if it took 420 years for the infrared waves to reach us, then the planet is 1 million, 420 years (give or take), I guess.

Time and money crunches doomed Beagle 2

The inquiry into why Beagle 2 was doomed released a summary of its report today.

Ironically, Beagle 2's ambitious scientific goals - to search directly for signs of Martian life - may have played a role in the mission's undoing. The summary states: "the very high potential scientific benefits of the project may have contributed to a collective institutional underestimate by us all of [how] to identify and mitigate the risks [resulting from] the very tight financial, mass and schedule constraints".

The tight time constraint arose because Beagle 2 had to be ready to launch on Mars Express, which itself was assembled in record time to take advantage of the close approach between Mars and Earth in 2003.