Explorer-12 and Meteor/TOMS

By | |
Comments Off on Explorer-12 and Meteor/TOMS

Two bits of space history today.

First, 50 years ago, Explorer-12 was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Thor-Delta rocket. Part of the extensive Explorer series, Explorer-12 was the first of a sub-series of four satellites orbited to “measure cosmic-ray particles, trapped particles, solar wind protons, and magnetospheric and interplanetary magnetic fields.”


(Model of the Explorer-12 satellite, on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air & Space Museum. NASM image.)

And then 20 years ago a U.S. meteorological instrument — a Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) — was for the first time launched as part of a Soviet satellite. The Meteor/TOMS launched from Plesetsk on a Tsiklon-3 (read, “Cyclone-3”) rocket.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

My First Air Force Orders

By | |
Comments Off on My First Air Force Orders

Pawing around in the filing cabinet, I found my Extended Active Duty Order, dated 25 years ago today: August 12, 1986.


(US Air Force seal. Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The orders assigned me to the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory (Air Force Systems Command), Edwards AFB, California.

In officialspeak, Block 12 of the orders told me exactly what to do:

Effective date of duty is on or after 9 Sep 86. On or after this date, individual will proceed and report not earlier than 0800 and not later than 2400 hours on 15 Sep 86 to the 24 hour arrival point, Edwards AFB CA.

And thus, the stage was set for the adventure …

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Double Dose of Space History: Lunar Photos Station Shuttle

By | |
Comments Off on Double Dose of Space History: Lunar Photos Station Shuttle

Forty-five years ago today — August 10, 1966 — Lunar Orbiter 1 was launched atop an Atlas Agena rocket out of Cape Canaveral.


(Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. NASA image.)

Lunar Orbiter 1 was the first of five spacecraft that took photographs of predominantly smooth areas of the Moon so landing sites for Surveyor and Apollo missions could be selected. Mission controllers got the opportunity to deal with some real-time problems during the spacecraft’s flight to the Moon:

The spacecraft experienced a temporary failure of the Canopus star tracker (probably due to stray sunlight) and overheating during its cruise to the Moon. The star tracker problem was resolved by navigating using the Moon as a reference and the overheating was abated by orienting the spacecraft 36 degrees off-Sun to lower the temperature.

Although some of the first orbiter’s photographs were smeared, the mission was an overall success, including taking the first two images of the Earth from the vicinity of the moon.

And on this date 10 years ago, the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-105. Astronauts Scott J. Horowitz, Frederick “Rick” W. Sturckow, Daniel T. Barry, and Patrick G. Forrester transported 7,000 pounds of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station. They also ferried the ISS Expedition 3 crew — Frank L. Culbertson, Jr. (see below), Vladimir N. Dezhurov, and Mikhail Tyurin — to the station and returned the Expedition 2 crew — Yury V. Usachev, James S. Voss, and Susan J. Helms — to Earth.

Eight years after his return to earth, I sat next to Captain (USN, Retired) Culbertson at the NASA Industry-Education Forum in Washington, DC. He was a very nice fellow, despite having graduated from a rival high school down in Charleston.

Many years ago I gave up my dream of being an astronaut (I’d already worked Shuttle landings at Edwards AFB, but failed to be accepted as a Flight Test Engineer candidate), but it’s cool to have met and worked for some. Thankfully, I can still take imaginary voyages through my own and others’ fiction.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Last Mission of the Luna Program

By | |
Comments Off on Last Mission of the Luna Program

Thirty-five years ago today — August 9, 1976 — Luna-24 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Proton-K rocket.


(Graphic of the lunar sample return portion of the Luna-24 mission. Image from the National Space Science Data Center.)

Luna-24 was the third Soviet mission to retrieve and return lunar ground samples, and the last mission for their Luna spacecraft series.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Genesis Launched

By | |
Comments Off on Genesis Launched

Ten years ago today — August 8, 2001– a Delta-II rocket launched from Cape Canaveral carrying the Genesis probe.*


(Genesis spacecraft. NASA image.)

Genesis operated for the next three years, collecting samples of the solar wind to discover clues about the origin and development of the solar system. It orbited the semi-stable L-1 point between Earth and the Sun.

In 2004 Genesis returned to earth with its samples, but its parachute did not deploy during re-entry. It crashed instead of soft-landing, though useful samples were still recovered from it.

You can learn more about the Genesis mission on this page.

___
*Not the one from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Dual-Satellite Mission: Dynamics Explorer

By | |
Comments Off on Dual-Satellite Mission: Dynamics Explorer

Thirty years ago today — August 3, 1981 — a Delta rocket out of Vandenberg AFB placed two satellites in orbit for a unique interactive mission.


(DE-1 image of an aurora over North America, taken with the University of Iowa’s Spin-Scan Auroral Imager. NASA image.)

Dynamics Explorer 1 and Dynamics Explorer 2 were high- and low-altitude spacecraft, respectively, intended to

investigate the strong interactive processes coupling the hot, tenuous, convecting plasmas of the magnetosphere and the cooler, denser plasmas and gases corotating in the earth’s ionosphere, upper atmosphere, and plasmasphere.

The spacecrafts’ orbits were such that one made high-altitude observations while the other made low-altitude observations, which could be compared to better understand atmospheric dynamics and the interaction of our atmosphere with charged particles from the Sun. Mission operations ended in 1991.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Summertime Shuttle

By | |
Comments Off on Summertime Shuttle

Twenty years ago today — August 2, 1991 — the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center carrying five astronauts and a new Tracking and Data Relay Satellite.


(Nice shot of an unnamed storm, taken from STS-43. NASA image.)

The mission STS-43 crew, John E. Blaha, Michael A. Baker, Shannon W. Lucid, G. David Low, and James C. Adamson, released TDRS-E the same day, but remained in orbit another week conducting a variety of experiments.

— BREAK, BREAK —

In other (non-space-history) news, yesterday my speechwriting teacher Joan Detz kindly blogged about my story in Analog. Thanks, Joan!

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Reviews, Good and … Less Good

By | |
Comments Off on Reviews, Good and … Less Good

My friends with more stories in print than I have many different perspectives on reviews. Some avoid anything that smacks of a review, others read every review and pay them greater or lesser amounts of heed, and some study the reviews — good or bad — to see what lessons they can learn from them to improve their craft.

I would like to take that final approach, but only time (and hopefully some future publications) will tell. But with that as an aim, at least, I’ve read a few reviews of “Therapeutic Mathematics and the Physics of Curve Balls,” my story in the September issue of Analog.

Most recently, Tangent Online‘s Sherry Decker posted a quite positive review:

Does Joey run after the scientist or return to the freak show and protect his only friends? It’s an agonizing choice.

This SF/F story takes place in the early 1940s, right about the time J. Robert Oppenheimer’s involvement in the Manhattan Project succeeded in changing the world forever. Who, other than Gray Rinehart ever imagined solving the final equation was due to the genius and youngest member of Fineas Ferguson’s Fabulous Freakshow on his one, lonely, stolen day?

Sensitive character creation, believable atmosphere, clever conclusion. Well done. I enjoyed it.

To balance the scale, the eminent Lois Tilton at Locus posted a neutral review a few weeks ago:

An interesting enough situation, but weak on resolution, offering one of those ambiguous endings that don’t quite tell us what the character has chosen and definitely not what will come of his choice. There are some rather tantalizing hints of WWII secrets, but nothing comes of them.

To some people that might come across as negative, but the fact that she thought the story situation was interesting and that I served up “tantalizing hints” of more is, to my way of thinking, pretty good.

Elsewhere on the web, SFRevu’s Sam Tomaino called the story “a nicely told tale with a good sense of the time in which it was taking place,” and British reviewer John Fairhurst said it was “a rather nice tale with the bleakness of Joey’s life in the show being counterpointed by flashbacks to his life with his father” and “eventually, an uplifting tale.”

All the reviews aren’t in, of course, and doubtless some readers will not have enjoyed the story at all. I’m pleased that anyone enjoyed it, but most especially that Dr. Schmidt enjoyed it enough to publish it!

This goes to show, I think, that every story is not for every reader. Still, I appreciate the work the reviewers do month in and month out — living deep in the slush pile as I do, I do NOT envy them their task — and I hope to use the comments, good or bad, to make my next stories even better.

And in the end I can always reflect on the fact that this issue had a FANTASTIC cover:

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

A New Target for Asteroid Exploration?

By | |
Comments Off on A New Target for Asteroid Exploration?

NASA reported yesterday that Canadian astronomer Martin Connors of Athabasca University identified a 1000-foot-wide asteroid orbiting in a very convoluted path around the Earth’s leading LaGrange point.

Connors made the discovery using data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft.


(Image from the WISE spacecraft, with the newly discovered asteroid 2010 TK7 circled in green. NASA image.)

Surprisingly, the New Scientist article in which I first learned about the find pitches it inaccurately as an asteroid stalking the Earth. It is more accurate to say the asteroid is leading the Earth in its orbit around the sun.

The asteroid is roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter. It has an unusual orbit that traces a complex motion near a stable point in the plane of Earth’s orbit, although the asteroid also moves above and below the plane. The object is about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Earth. The asteroid’s orbit is well-defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles (24 million kilometers).

NASA has an interesting video of the asteroid’s orbit: Earth’s First Trojan Asteroid (NASA video)

Alas, 2010 TK7’s odd orbital path probably excludes it from being explored and exploited any time soon. But there are plenty of other possibilities still waiting to be found for future explorers … and even for fictional ones like the “Asteroid Consortium” in my novel.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Apollo-15: Endeavour, Falcon, Lunar Rover … and Books

By | |
Comments Off on Apollo-15: Endeavour, Falcon, Lunar Rover … and Books

Forty years ago today — July 26, 1971 — Apollo-15 lifted off from Cape Canaveral with astronauts David R. Scott, James B. Irwin, and Alfred M. Worden, to become the fourth manned mission to land on the Moon.

The Apollo-15 mission was the first of three upgraded missions designed to maximize the scientific returns from the program. Scott, the commander, and Irwin, the lunar module pilot, landed on the Moon on July 30th in the Lunar Module “Falcon”, and spent several days exploring and collecting samples. Worden, the command module pilot, remained in orbit in the Command and Service Module “Endeavour” and photographed several high-interest lunar formations.


(Lunar Roving Vehicle, first used on Apollo-15. NASA image.)

Apollo-15 was the first mission to feature the Lunar Roving Vehicle. For those interested in the technical details,

The Lunar Roving Vehicle had a mass of 210 kg and was designed to hold a payload of an additional 490 kg on the lunar surface. The frame was 3.1 meters long with a wheelbase of 2.3 meters. The maximum height was 1.14 meters. The frame was made of aluminum alloy 2219 tubing welded assemblies and consisted of a 3 part chassis which was hinged in the center so it could be folded up and hung in the Lunar Module quad 1 bay. It had two side-by-side foldable seats made of tubular aluminum with nylon webbing and aluminum floor panels. An armrest was mounted between the seats, and each seat had adjustable footrests and a velcro seatbelt. A large mesh dish antenna was mounted on a mast on the front center of the rover. The suspension consisted of a double horizontal wishbone with upper and lower torsion bars and a damper unit between the chassis and upper wishbone. Fully loaded the LRV had a ground clearance of 36 cm.

The wheels consisted of a spun aluminum hub and an 81.8 cm diameter, 23 cm wide tire made of zinc coated woven 0.083 cm diameter steel strands attached to the rim and discs of formed aluminum. Titanium chevrons covered 50% of the contact area to provide traction. Inside the tire was a 64.8 cm diameter bump stop frame to protect the hub. Dust guards were mounted above the wheels. Each wheel had its own electric drive, a DC series wound 0.25 hp motor capable of 10,000 rpm, attached to the wheel via an 80:1 harmonic drive, and a mechanical brake unit. Manuevering capability was provided through the use of front and rear steering motors. Each series wound DC steering motor was capable of 0.1 hp. Both sets of wheels would turn in opposite directions, giving a steering radius of 3.1 meters, or could be decoupled so only one set would be used for steering. Power was provided by two 36-volt silver-zinc potassium hydroxide non-rechargeable batteries with a capacity of 121 amp-hr. These were used to power the drive and steering motors and also a 36 volt utility outlet mounted on front of the LRV to power the communications relay unit or the TV camera. Passive thermal controls kept the batteries within an optimal temperature range.

The lunar rover performed well during Apollo-15 and the next two lunar missions, and enabled the astronauts to examine much more terrain than they could have otherwise.

Apollo-15 landed on the eastern edge of Mare Imbrium, at the base of the Apennine range, near the snaking channel known as Hadley Rille:


(Hadley Rille, taken from the Apollo-15 Lunar Module on the last orbit prior to landing. NASA image.)

Of interest to those of us with a literary bent, Hadley Rille was the source of the name for Hadley Rille Books, a small but well-respected publisher of science fiction and fantasy. One of their recent releases is Buffalito Contingency, by my friend Lawrence Schoen (whom I interviewed here and here). Their Footprints anthology is also very good, and proof that their lunar fascination is not just in name only.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmailby feather