Category Archives: NASA

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The Last Space Shuttle Mission

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Countdown To History

Atlantis blasting off on her maiden mission, October 3, 1985. Courtesy NASA.

Friday July 8th, 2011 is the targeted date for NASA’s final space shuttle mission launch. This is when Atlantis is slated to take off, bringing to an end a largely successful part of NASA’s history of human spaceflight. It seems as if this end has been a long time coming, yet in another way, it seems that it wasn’t all that long ago we were eagerly awaiting the first space shuttle launch. That took place on April 12, 1981, when Columbia took to the skies for the first time as the first reusable orbita spacecraft flight to space.

So, it’s just been slightly over 30 years of roaring blast-offs and delicate orbital dances by astronauts and orbiting “birds” as they deployed satellites, repaired and serviced Hubble Space Telescope, did science experiments, and worked on building the International Space Station. And, in two cases, Challenger and Columbia (the first orbiter), missions ended in tragedy.

It’s been a hell of a great ride, particularly for the astronauts who took their places in the cockpit and middeck of each space shuttle for every mission.  I’ve met some of those people, among them Sally Ride, Loren Acton, John Young, John Grunsfeld, Claude Nicollier, Kalpana Chawla, Ellison Onizuka, Marsha Ivins, and Michael Foale. Every one of them is the kind of person you’d want to send to space because they have what we all have come to know as the “right stuff” — that focused view on doing the job right the first time and then sharing what they know with the rest of us.

I met most of these astronauts when I was in graduate school or since then at various meetings.  Marsha Ivins came and gave a talk at the University of Colorado during a visit “back home” (she’s a fellow alum) and she was so encouraging about having all of us “keep looking up” that I’ve never forgotten her.  Kalpana Chawla was another CU alum, and we heard her give a presentation that was a marvel of clarity and enthusiasm. Claude Nicollier astonished me at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society when he asked for MY autograph (he’d read the book about Hubble that I authored with John C. Brandt), and he was one of the most gracious people I’ve ever met. Same with John Grunsfeld (who asked for my autograph when I should have been asking for his), who visited Hubble a record four times to bring our telescope back up to spec.  If it hadn’t been for folks like John and Claude and the crews of astronauts who worked on HST, I’m sure that much of our team’s science wouldn’t have gotten done.

There are scientists around the world whose work has benefited from having flown on a shuttle, or deployed to space from a shuttle.  There are also students around the world who benefited from lessons sent back from the shuttles, and ham radio operators who monitored and chatted with the astronauts as they circled the globe on their various missions.

Way back in the 80s, I dreamed of flying in a shuttle, maybe as a payload specialist or something. I never made it. But that dream sent me back to school to at least TRY to make it, and I ended up studying as much astronomy and space science and planetary science as I could gobble up. Ultimately I came out of graduate school more grounded in space than I ever expected. Even though I’m not “of” space travel, I write more about it and share it with other people.  For that, I have the space shuttle program to thank — even though I wasn’t “of” that, either. But, as a spur to doing greater things — hey — it worked!

So, as I watch the last launch on Friday, it will be with a tremendous sense of history and pride in a program that showed us what could be done. Sure, it wasn’t without its problems (both technical AND political), but the shuttles showed us what could be done when people put their minds to working and living in low-Earth orbit.  I can only hope that the next program does the shuttles one better — which is a tall order to fill for a program that is still being developed.  As they retreat into the annals of human spaceflight history, those shuttles are leaving behind some mighty big vapor trails to fill.

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Dawn at the Asteroid: The Approach

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Vesta Comes into View

A still from a short movie taken as the spacecraft Dawn gets closer to asteroid Vesta. Courtesy NASA/JPL_Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Well, this may not look like much, but it’s a big deal in the asteroid-study game. It’s an image of asteroid Vesta, taken with the Dawn spacecraft. If you visit the the mission’s web pages at NASA, you can watch a multi-still “movie” made from frames taken by the spacecraft’s framing cameras on June 1.  The video presents 20 frames, looped five times, that span a 30-minute period. During that time, Vesta rotates about 30 degrees. The images included here are used by navigators to fine-tune Dawn’s trajectory during its approach to Vesta, with arrival expected on July 16, 2011.

Why a mission to Vesta?   It is the only large asteroid with a basaltic surface that formed due to volcanic processes early in the solar system’s history. Asteroids, like comets, are treasure troves of information about what was going 0n in the infant solar system — some 4.5 billion years ago. Here’s how that works. During the earliest history of our solar system, the elements, minerals, and chemical compounds in the solar nebula were distributed throughout the nebula, with their exact locations varying due with their distance from the Sun (and its heat). As distance from the Sun increases, the temperature drops. The young Sun, hot and active, drove away or consumed gases and icy bodies, leaving behind rocky materials to form the inner (so-called “terrestrial” bodies) close by. The icy worlds and gas giants formed farther away.

So, the division of the solar system into terrestrial and gas/ice giant worlds is a large-scale division.  Our planets have changed over time, particularly the Earth, with its atmospheric change, its geological change, and the evolution of life (which has affected conditions on the planet as well). To learn more about the “pure” or what planetary scientists call, the “pristine” materials that made up the big parts of the solar system, we need to look at the smaller-scale objects: asteroids and comets. Studying asteroids (and comets) and studying their compositions are a way of peering into the distant past and learning what it was like, sort of like looking at your baby pictures and seeing what you were then and comparing it to what you are now.

You probably didn’t know this, but Vesta is considered a protoplanet because it is a large body that almost formed into a planet.  It is 330 miles (530 kilometers) across, and is the second most massive object in the Asteroid Belt — that region of space between Mars and Jupiter that is populated with asteroids.  In a few days, we’ll have even better images of this distant “almost-a-planet” world, so keep your eyes peeled for more news.

Speaking of news, this week’s Carnival of Space is up, posted over at John Williams’s Starry Critters web site. Check it out for some unique looks at places and spaces throughout the cosmos.