Category Archives: NASA

endeavour, launches, media, NASA, sky & telescope magazine

Out to Launch

Leave a comment

and Back Again

Endeavour with her support structure rolled away, April 26, 2011. Image copyright Carolyn Collins Petersen.

Well, we went down to Florida to film the launch of space shuttle Endeavour (Mission STS-134) a week ago, but as everybody who follows the space program knows, the launch got scrubbed a few hours before scheduled blast-off due to a failed component deep inside the orbiter. (You can read more about that here.)

Mark and I are accredited press (covering for Sky & Telescope.com) and were also going to film the launch in fulldome video.  We still plan to return and cover the launch festivities, as soon as NASA announces the date for the next try.In fact, S&T ran a pre-launch story I wrote, and I have a couple of other stories just waiting to be finished and uploaded after launch (or whenever it goes).

It wasn’t our first launch visit; that was in 1983, followed by a spectacular launch visit in 1993. We are pretty excited about seeing this one, since it was the shuttle that took up the first Hubble Space Telescope servicing crew, and that’s the second launch I saw. At the time, I was working on an HST instrument team, so it was a pretty personal experience, knowing that the crew was going to be working to make things right so we could do our science. Now, not quite 18 years later, I get to see these things as a science writer and documentary producer, but I still get as excited as I always have about seeing a launch.

One of the coolest experiences we had during the run-up to the scrubbed launch day a week or so back was the opportunity to go out to the pad and watch as the support structure rolled away to reveal Endeavour sitting there like a moth on her external tank. The press folks at the Kennedy Space Center arranged for a press visit and so we found ourselves standing there, a few hundred yards from the orbiter in the dark of night, watching as the structure slowly rolled away. It was — and I say this channeling my inner space geek — one of the most awesome sights!

We didn’t even mind the mosquitos and muggy air; the sight of the orbiter was just stunning. And, I was very aware that this was an experience that not everyone gets to have — the opportunity to be that close to an orbiter the day before it thunders up into the sky on the backs of its rockets and fuel tanks.  Geek that I am, I just drank in the site and didn’t want to leave.

While we were waiting for the servicing structure to roll back, I got into an interesting conversation with a woman and her husband who had come out as part of the NASA launch Tweetup group. They’d been invited along on the press tour to the launch pad. Her name was Clare and her husband was Sean. He looked familiar — at first I thought he was a science writer I’d met at a meeting earlier this year.  We chatted about writing for Twitter and Facebook, and since it was something of a long wait, Seth went around taking pictures before the retraction started. Mark was nearby, with our allsky camera ready to start shooting when the retraction started.

Clare and I ended up talking about space launches, Griffith Observatory (they live in LA), and a lot of other topics of mutual interest to people who are standing around waiting for something cool to happen that they know is a rare experience and worth waiting for. Turns out Clare and her husband are fairly well-known actors: Clare Grant and Seth Green, and apparently, very much into the space program — as Mark and I are.  I enjoyed the conversation we had very much and it was fun to get to know some new people who shared the same passion with us.

Conversations like that, shared with people from other walks of life, really remind me just how much the exploration of space really touches people.  The Kennedy Space Center was swarming, not just with press folk, but also the Tweeters — who were also from everywhere and of all ages. They got special tours and chances to see things that many of us who have covered space launches for years have seen before — but are new to them.  I felt bad for them when the launch was scrubbed because it’s not clear that they will get to come back for the next attempt. I hope they can, because a launch is an amazing experience.

I plan to go back, and I hope that all the others who made the trip can come back, too.  While NASA isn’t shutting down space exploration, these last two launches are special to all of us who see space exploration as an important thing.  The launches mark the end of one era, and hopefully, the beginning of a new one in humanity’s steps out to the stars.

Mercury, MESSENGER, NASA

Standard Mercury Orbit, Mr. Sulu

1 Comment

Mercury Has a Long-Term Visitor

MESSENGER at Mercury (artist's conception). Courtesy MESSENGER Mission.

Last night I went down to the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado for a briefing and “wait-it-out” event for the MESSENGER spacecraft’s orbital insertion. The lab built one of the instruments onboard the spacecraft — the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS). As I was sitting there watching the folks in the control room at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (by remote link), I thought about all the times we’ve seen “standard parking” orbit commands applied in shows like Star Trek. They make it sound so easy. The captain just says “Standard orbit” to the helm, the officer punches a few buttons or slides a fader or waves a hand over the console, and the ship slides into the correct spot.  What we don’t see are the ship’s thrusters firing to nudge the ship — a massive behemoth compared to a small planetary probe like MESSENGER —  from its previous course into the parking orbit around the world it’s visiting.

We didn’t actually see MESSENGER’s thruster fire either last night. What we heard was a stream of announcements that told us what the Doppler readings were from the spacecraft as its fuel tanks fed the thruster that nudged it into a parking orbit (highly elliptical at that!) around Mercury.  You can see an animation of how it might have looked here.

To see the kind of orbital trip MESSENGER has taken since its launch on August 3, 2004 , go here for an animation showing its long journey. As of today, the spacecraft has traveled 4,902,668,000 miles. That’s 7,890,000,000 kilometers, or 52.7 astronomical units. If Messenger had traveled in a straight line for that distance, it would be well beyond the most distant point of Pluto’s orbit!

MESSENGER's orbit around Mercury is very elliptical, meaning its lowest point is only about 124 miles (200 km) above the surface and gets as far asway as 9,300 miles (15,000 km) at its most distant. The closest approach of the orbit will take it high over the north pole, where there is some radar evidence of something -- possibly water ice -- hidden on crater walls. Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL.

MESSENGER is small, only about the size of a minivan, so it wouldn’t take nearly as much power to put it into “standard orbit” as a giant starship would need.  But, the principles are the same no matter what size of object you’re trying to put in orbit around another one.  The incoming object has a certain path it’s following, and it’s going at a certain speed. If you want the spacecraft to merely fly by, you wouldn’t need to deviate the probe from its path.  But, if you want it to go into orbit, you have to slow it down at the right place, the right time, and at the right rate. Once you do that, you’ve got your spacecraft (regardless of its size) at a point where the gravitational pull of the planet it’s orbiting is EXACTLY matched by the spacecraft’s speed around the planet. It’s a constant tug of war that must be balanced correctly.

Now that MESSENGER is safely orbiting Mercury, scientists are testing its systems to make sure they’re doing okay in the hot, harsh environment around the planet.  The spacecraft is subject to solar heating eleven times hotter than we experience here on Earth, and it is protected with a sunshade to protect the delicate instruments inside. As soon as they’re satisfied that all systems are working on the nominal, they’ll turn the instruments on and commence the next phase of mission science.  The first images should start streaming to Earth in the first part of April, so stay tuned!