Watching the Launch

A Thing of Beauty

Space shuttle Atlantis and the rising Moon.  Courtesy NASA TV.
Space shuttle Endeavour and the rising Moon. Carolyn's screen shot of a NASA TV feed.

Okay, I watched tonight’s launch of STS-126 Space shuttle Endeavour from my computer, via three NASA feeds and a CNN feed of a NASA feed. It was an absolutely stunning launch and I watched it with dozens of my BFFs as we Twittered the launch to each other.  Here are a few screen shots I took.

The first one showed the launch complex with the shuttle and a stunning-looking Moon rising behind it.  They kept switching back and forth between this view and some closeups of the shuttle and engines, and then some interviews with folks at Kennedy Space Center and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Launch of STS-126, space shuttle Atlantis.
Launch of STS-126, space shuttle Endeavour. Carolyn's screen shot from the NASA TV feed.

Then came the planned launch hold at T-9 minutes, where they did final checks, polled the mission managers about current issues, and waited for the launch window to open that would bring Endeavour to the best path for the International Space Station (where it will be for the next 16 days).

Then, an agonizing discussion about an open door on the launch gantry. You could see it swinging back and forth as the gantry moved back from the shuttle. In the end, the launch managers decided that the door didn’t pose a threat, so they polled everybody and the situation was “go for launch” at just a few minutes before the planned launch time.

Then, it was time for launch!  I must admit that I find it hard to watch launches, even though I’ve been to several. I sit here and urge them on, hoping all the while that no harm will come to the crew.  And, it didn’t. Launch went off flawlessly! I was silently cheering them on until they got past 72 seconds… I think you all know why.

One of the coolest things about launches these days is that they attach little cameras onto the main tank. Which means that you get to watch as the SRBs detach all the way through the main tank separation. And, it’s a pretty cool view, as you can see here. I was madly taking screen shots as the launch progressed to “press to MECO” and so on, in order to get these views.

Tank-cam view of external tank separation; the shuttle orbiter is at the upper right; tank is at the bottom. Screen shot Carolyn Collins Petersen, courtesy NASA TV.
Tank-cam view of external tank separation; the shuttle orbiter is at the upper right; tank is at the bottom. Carolyn's screenshot from the NASA TV feed.

I watched it until there was no more to be seen and the scene switched over to Mission Control in Houston, TX.

Scenes like this just blow me away because sometimes it’s hard to believe that I can sit here in my office on a Friday night and watch a shuttle launch on my computer, and watch via a tiny little camera on a fuel tank as that tank separates from a shuttle orbiter speeding away from Earth into orbit.

If anybody had told me as a kid that I’d be doing this routinely as an adult, I would never have believed them. But, here we are — and there they go. What a ride!

And, it may be geeky, but what a way to spend a rainy Friday night in November, watching the nation’s space agency send folks up to orbit, safely and on time.

Restoring Old Visions

Early Visions of Earth and the Moon

Earth as seen by one of the Lunar Orbiters as it came around the Moon during a survey mission.
Earth as seen by NASA's Lunar Orbiter 1 as it came around the Moon during a survey mission. (Click to embiggen)

Now that the Indian Space Research Organisation has rammed into the Moon with their Moon Impact probe, it’s time to look back at the U.S.’s own first efforts to study our nearest neighbor in space. The early heady early days of lunar exploration — a time that I look back to through a certain thickness of rose-colored glasses — brought humanity’s first looks at our planet as a planet — and of course, our first up-close visions of the Moon’s surface. I was in grade school then, getting ready for the rigors of junior high and high school, and I was space-mad even then. I pored over every picture they published from the Gemini and Lunar Orbiter missions, and then once we started sending people to the Moon, I followed that, too.

So, it was fun to see the first of what I hope are many of the 1960s-era “glamour shots” of the Moon and Earth being re-released by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Program. These images were first used to help pinpoint landing spots for the subsequent Apollo missions. At the time they were sent back, the technology to recover high-resolution imagery didn’t exist, but the data were there. Scientists got what they needed from the tapes and then put them in storage.

Fast-forward a few decades and the tape drives containing all that information were the subject of a rescue effort by Nancy Evans (who worked at JPL) and Mark Nelson (from CalTech).  They spent some time trying to raise private funds to recover the data, and eventually the tapes and drives got sent back to storage in a barn in Sun Valley, California.

Eventually the tapes made their way back to NASA Ames and the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Program was born, led by Dennis Wingo (the project program lead).

The cool thing about the recovery of these images is that they are still extremely scientifically useful, especially now that high-tech image recovery and enhancement techniques can be used to bring out the full resolution inherent in the data.  The restored images will give scientists a basic set of images — a baseline, if you will — against which they can measure the images now coming in from various lunar probes, and particularly those from the upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission in 2009. Any surface changes that have occurred since the Lunar Orbiter images were taken will be quite obvious and will help mission planners assess the long-term risks that moon explorers and eventual colonists will have to face as they set up shop on the Moon’s surface. The recovered images will be made available to the public as they come out of the recovery “chute” at Ames, and will also be put into the Planetary Data System. The USGS will be working on calibrating them with standard mapping coordinates to bring them up to par with other solar system bodies over the past decades.