Cap'n Bob & the Damsel

Rocket Science

New Horizons off to Pluto

Today, the New Horizons spacecraft was launched from the Cape Canaveral Launch Complex. It looked spectacular on NASA’s streaming video!

From NASA:

NASA – New Horizons

After launch aboard a Lockheed-Martin Atlas V rocket, the New Horizons spacecraft set out on a journey to the edge of the solar system. Liftoff occurred Jan. 19, 2006 at 2:00:00 p.m. EST from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. New Horizons is headed for a distant rendezvous with the mysterious planet Pluto almost a decade from now.

Space artist Dan Durda was commissioned to do artist’s renditions for the project and thinks that New Horizons could encounter this view of Pluto and Charon while looking back toward the Sun when it arrives in a decade:

19 Jan 2006 by Aerospace Astronomy Rocket Science

Stardust Home After 2.88 Billion Mile Voyage

The Stardust probe landed safely in Utah this morning, bringing with it cometary and interstellar particles collected over a nearly 3 billion mile journey. After the recovered capsule is returned to Houston, it will be opened and the process of analysis will begin. Home PC users are being asked to help with locating and identifying recovered particles.

NASA’s Stardust sample return mission returned safely to Earth when the capsule carrying cometary and interstellar particles successfully touched down at 2:10 a.m. Pacific time (3:10 a.m. Mountain time) in the desert salt flats of the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range.

“Ten years of planning and seven years of flight operations were realized early this morning when we successfully picked up our return capsule off of the desert floor in Utah,” said Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The Stardust project has delivered to the international science community material that has been unaltered since the formation of our solar system.”

. . .

The sample return capsule’s science canister and its cargo of comet and interstellar dust particles will be stowed inside a special aluminum carrying case to await transfer to the Johnson Space Center, Houston, where it will be opened. NASA’s Stardust mission traveled 2.88 billion miles during its seven-year round-trip odyssey. Scientists believe these precious samples will help provide answers to fundamental questions about comets and the origins of the solar system.

My money’s on finding traces of the same heavy elements we see on our own planet and in spectrographs of astronomical objects throughout the universe.

Read NASA’s Comet Tale Draws to a Successful Close in Utah Desert for the entire story.

15 Jan 2006 by Astronomy Rocket Science

Preview: Weapons of the 21st Century

New technologies using the electromagnetic spectrum show promise for better, more effective weapons to defend America – but only if the government provides the funding and support.

From Space.Com:

E-Weapons: Directed Energy Warfare In The 21st Century

LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico — There is a new breed of weaponry fast approaching—and at the speed of light no less. They are labeled “directed-energy weapons” and may well signal a revolution in military hardware—perhaps more so than the atomic bomb.

Directed-energy weapons take the form of lasers, high-powered microwaves, and particle beams. Their adoption for ground, air, sea, and space warfare depends not only on using the electromagnetic spectrum, but also upon favorable political and budgetary wavelengths too.

That’s the outlook of J. Douglas Beason, author of the recently published book: The E-Bomb: How America’s New Directed Energy Weapons Will Change the Way Wars Will Be Fought in the Future (Da Capo Press, October 2005).Beason previously served on the White House staff working for the President’s Science Advisor (Office of Science and Technology Policy) under both the Bush and Clinton Administrations.

This concept particularly intrigued me in that it also has potential in the area of law enforcement. Think of applications where a taser might be used, or in a hostage or standoff situation:

Then there’s Active Denial Technology—a non-lethal way to use millimeter-wave electromagnetic energy to stop, deter, and turn back an advancing adversary. This technology, supported by the U.S. Marines, uses a beam of millimeter waves to heat a foe’s skin, causing severe pain without damage, and making the adversary flee the scene.

Sizzle, you asshole!

And God forbid that advertisements or worse, Hip-Hop/Rap get delivered via this medium:

Beason said that one blue sky idea of his own he tagged “the voice from heaven”. By tuning the resonance of a laser onto the Earth’s ionosphere, you can create audible frequencies. Like some boom box in the sky, the laser-produced voice could bellow from above down to the target below: “Put down your weapons.”

The article concludes with the inevitable problem of bureaucracy holding technology back (emphasis added):

History lesson

Late last year, speaking before the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., Beason told his audience that laser energy, the power sources, beam control, as well as knowledge about how laser beams interact with Earth’s atmosphere are quite mature. The technology is ready to shift into front line warfare status.

“The good news is that directed-energy exists. Directed-energy is being tested and within a few years directed-energy is going to be deployed upon the battlefield,” Beason reported. “But the bad news is that acquisition policies right now in this nation are one more gear toward evolutionary practices rather than revolutionary practices.”

“Visionaries win wars…and not bureaucrats. We’ve seen this through history,” Beason observed.

You can be assured that non-visionary bureaucrats (Ted Kennedys, Barbara Boxers and John Kerrys) will fight any new technologies tooth and nail.

11 Jan 2006 by Military Rocket Science

Stardust to Return to Earth

NASA’s Stardust capsule is scheduled to streak across western skies over a path from Crescent City, California, Winnemucca and Elko, Nevada to its touchdown point in western Utah. The probe will return minute particles collected during it’s journey in space.

One of my daily visits, SpaceWeather.com had this information:

FIREBALL ALERT: On Sunday morning, Jan. 15th, between 1:56 and 1:59 a.m. PST, a brilliant fireball will streak over northern California and Nevada. It’s NASA’s Stardust capsule, returning to Earth with samples of dust from Comet Wild 2. The best observing sites are near Carlin and Elko, Nevada, where the man-made meteor is expected to shine as much as 60 times brighter than Venus.

The flight path of the Stardust capsule

The fireball might be widely visible from parts of Oregon, Idaho and Utah as well as California and Nevada: observing tips. NASA is interested in videos and photos of the re-entry, which could help researchers learn more about, e.g., the physics of heat shields. Got data? Send it here.

After the spacecraft returns, volunteers will analyze the micrographs by looking for “needles” in “haystacks” – minute particles, few and far between – from electronic images distributed for analysis, similar to the Search for Extra Terrestrial Institute’s distributed processing of SETI data. You can volunteer and maybe be part of the team at Stardust@Home.

10 Jan 2006 by Astronomy Cyberspace Rocket Science

SOHO Marks 10th Year

One of my top 10 things to be thankful for is technology, which gives mankind insights into the unknown. One of these technological wonders is SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Satellite located at Earth’s inner Lagrangian point.

From SpaceWeather.com:

10 YEARS OF SOHO: Where would we be without SOHO? The orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) keeps a ’round-the-clock eye on the sun and is crucial to space weather forecasting. Thousands of our readers have witnessed auroras only because SOHO spotted an incoming CME [coronal mass ejection] in time for us to issue an alert.

So it is with pleasure and appreciation that we wish a happy 10th anniversary to the SOHO team, whose spacecraft was launched on Dec. 2nd, 1995. Originally planned as a two year mission, SOHO is now entering its second decade. Amazing.

And an article from Astronomy Picture of the Day indicates that operations are planned to continue until 2007, at which time SOHO will have been in position to observe a complete 11-year solar cycle (which, as we all know, is responsible for climate change and other phenomena – not the puny efforts of mankind who the moonbat left blame for the mythical global warming).

01 Dec 2005 by Aerospace Astronomy Environment Global Warming Rocket Science

Private Sector Lunar Plan to Compete with NASA

From SPACE.com — Private Sector, Low-Cost Lunar Plan Unveiled

A newly released study has focused on how best to return people to the Moon, reporting that future lunar missions can be done for under $10 billion – far less than a NASA price tag.

The multi-phased three-year study was done by a private space firm, SpaceDev of Poway, California, and concluded that safe, lower cost missions can be completed by the private sector using existing technology or innovative new technology expected to be available in time to support human exploration of the Moon in the near-future.

Artist rendition of the “rocket chair,” designed to lower people and equipment onto the lunar surface. credit: Spacedev

Fraction of time/cost

NASA has tallied its future lunar mission costs, projecting a figure of $104 billion over 13 years.

According to SpaceDev’s chief, Jim Benson, the private group has found that a more comprehensive series of missions could be completed in a fraction of the time and for one-tenth of the cost of the NASA estimate.

Each mission, as envisioned by SpaceDev, would position a habitat module in lunar orbit or on the moon’s surface. The habitat modules would remain in place after each mission and could be re-provisioned and re-used, thus building a complex of habitats at one or more lunar locations over time, according to a press statement on the study findings.

Benson also noted: “We are not surprised by the significant cost savings that our study concludes can be achieved without sacrificing safety and mission support.”

So – just what does NASA attribute the extra costs to?

22 Nov 2005 by Aerospace Rocket Science

Computer Brains in Space

In my job, making our products rad-hard is essential; use of TMR (triple-modular redundancy) and SECDED (single error correction/double error detection) are common practices in spacecraft systems design.

Perhaps science can develop a similar technology for the moonbat tinfoil-hat and koolaid crowd who are continuously bombarded by “radiation’ from the hard-left.

Excerpt from NASA – Computer Brains in Space:

When your computer behaves erratically, mauls your data, or just “crashes” completely, it can be frustrating. But for an astronaut trusting a computer to run navigation and life-support systems, computer glitches could be fatal.

Unfortunately, the radiation that pervades space can trigger such glitches. When high-speed particles, such as cosmic rays, collide with the microscopic circuitry of computer chips, they can cause chips to make errors. If those errors send the spacecraft flying off in the wrong direction or disrupt the life-support system, it could be bad news.

Right: The humans inside this spacecraft aren’t the only ones who need protection from space radiation; their computers do, too.

To ensure safety, most space missions use radiation hardened computer chips. “Rad-hard” chips are unlike ordinary chips in many ways. For example, they contain extra transistors that take more energy to switch on and off. Cosmic rays can’t trigger them so easily. Rad-hard chips continue to do accurate calculations when ordinary chips might “glitch.”

20 Nov 2005 by Aerospace Rocket Science

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