Author Archives: Gray Rinehart

New Songs at StellarCon

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What a difference a year makes!

At the time of StellarCon last year, I had written a grand total of one filk song, which I sang (a year ago today, in fact) at the DeepSouthCon 50 party: “The Monster Hunter Ballad.”

Fast forward to this past weekend at StellarCon 36, and my filk repertoire had grown to the point that I debuted two songs on Friday night: the Firefly tribute song “Finding Serenity,” and “Don’t Cry When You Get Rejected” (to the tune of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”).

But that wasn’t enough. Saturday afternoon I finished a Hobbit song I’d been working on, so that night I debuted “Thorin Oakenshield” (to the tune of “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer”). And even that wasn’t enough: I had started writing another new song at the con on Friday, and by Saturday night I had a couple of verses and a chorus for “Steampunk Pirates.” So the filk circle on Saturday also heard me sing my work-in-progress.

What is this craziness?

Whatever it is, it’s fun.

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Pioneer-10, First Spacecraft to Jupiter

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Forty years ago today — March 2, 1972 — Pioneer-10 launched from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas Centaur rocket, on its historic journey to the Solar System’s largest planet.


(The Pioneer Plaque designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. NASA image.)

Pioneer-10 was the first mission to fly beyond the orbit of Mars and the Asteroid Belt, and the first to explore Jupiter. Pioneer-10 passed within 81,000 miles (200,000 km) of Jupiter on December 3, 1973.

Fifteen experiments were carried to study the interplanetary and planetary magnetic fields; solar wind parameters; cosmic rays; transition region of the heliosphere; neutral hydrogen abundance; distribution, size, mass, flux, and velocity of dust particles; Jovian aurorae; Jovian radio waves; atmosphere of Jupiter and some of its satellites, particularly Io; and to photograph Jupiter and its satellites. Instruments carried for these experiments were magnetometer, plasma analyzer, charged particle detector, ionizing detector, non-imaging telescopes with overlapping fields of view to detect sunlight reflected from passing meteoroids, sealed pressurized cells of argon and nitrogen gas for measuring the penetration of meteoroids, UV photometer, IR radiometer, and an imaging photopolarimeter, which produced photographs and measured polarization.

In 1983, Pioneer-10 left our Solar System traveling in the general direction of Aldebaran, 68 light years away. It will take Pioneer-10 over two million years to reach Aldebaran. Should an alien civilization find Pioneer-10 during its voyage, they will also find a pictorial greeting in the form of a plaque on the side of the spacecraft.

On the plaque a man and woman stand before an outline of the spacecraft. The man’s hand is raised in a gesture of good will. The physical makeup of the man and woman were determined from results of a computerized analysis of the average person in our civilization.

The key to translating the plaque lies in understanding the breakdown of the most common element in the universe – hydrogen. This element is illustrated in the left-hand corner of the plaque in schematic form showing the hyperfine transition of neutral atomic hydrogen. Anyone from a scientifically educated civilization having enough knowledge of hydrogen would be able to translate the message. The plaque was designed by Dr. Carl Sagan and Dr. Frank Drake and drawn by Linda Salzman Sagan.

More information about Pioneer:

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Space History Today: Fourth Hubble Servicing Mission

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Ten years ago today — March 1, 2002 — the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from the Kennedy Space Center on the fourth servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.


(The Hubble Space Telescope in the shuttle cargo bay for repairs and upgrades, with a background of sunrise “airglow” on Earth’s horizon. NASA image.)

Astronauts Scott D. Altman, Duane G. Carey, John M. Grunsfeld, Nancy J. Currie, James H. Newman, Richard M. Linnehan, and Michael J. Massimino made up the crew of STS-109, and accomplished five spacewalks on this important mission.

The crew

  • removed and replaced the telescope’s two solar arrays with new, higher-efficiency arrays
  • installed a new Reaction Wheel Assembly
  • replaced the Power Control Unit
  • replaced Hubble’s Faint Object Camera with the Advanced Camera for Surveys
  • installed the Electronic Support Module and a cryocooler and Cooling System Radiator for an experimental cooling system for the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer

All of us who have enjoyed Hubble’s images and discoveries through the years can appreciate the effort to maintain and improve it over its operational life. Well done!

___

For a little bonus space history, on the same day that Columbia launched, the European Space Agency launched ENVISAT-1 on an Ariane-5 rocket out of Kourou. At 8.1 tonnes (nearly 18,000 lb), ENVISAT-1 was “reported to be the most massive and expensive of the European satellites.” It carried ten instruments for remote sensing of terrestrial environmental conditions such as global warming and desertification.

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My Story in Asimov’s and My StellarCon Schedule

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My near future military science fiction short story “Sensitive, Compartmented” is in the April/May double issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. Subscribers have been sent their copies (at least, I got my subscription copy), so it should show up on newsstands and the web site soon.


(Look for this cover to get my latest short story.)

Also, this weekend I’ll be a guest at StellarCon in High Point, NC. StellarCon is sponsored by the Science Fiction Fantasy Federation of UNC-Greensboro, and this year’s Guest of Honor is bestselling author Patrick Rothfuss.

Here’s what I’ll be doing at the Con:

Friday

  • 5 p.m. – “Hard Science Fiction” panel
  • 8 p.m. – Panel on “Short Stories and Publication”
  • 9 p.m. – Filk

Saturday

  • Noon – “Character Building” panel
  • 4 p.m. – Baen Books Traveling Road Show
  • 8:30 p.m. – Reading
  • 9 p.m. – More Filk (though I likely will have run out of songs)

I’m not sure yet what I’m going to read at my reading. Nor am I sure what I’m going to sing at my reading. I should probably figure that out.

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MystiCon Report

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Last weekend I returned to MystiCon in Roanoke, Virginia, and had a splendid — and at one point scary — time.

The splendid part was spending concentrated time with several of my writing friends. I had a couple of long conversations with Genre Princess Alethea Kontis, in which we commiserated about not being able to set aside sufficient time to do our own writing. (Everyone should make note of the fact that Lee’s book, Enchanted, is coming out in just a couple of months!)

I also had pleasant conversations with many other fine folks, including Gail Z. Martin, whose outlook on the current state of publishing was quite refreshing; Allen Wold, who graciously allowed me to serve again as a panelist in his writing workshop; David Halperin, whose insights during the “UFO Investigations” panel meant that I didn’t have to say much; and Danny Birt, who was kind enough to include me in a supper outing.

The scary part was finding out on Sunday morning that I’d slept through the hotel fire alarm the previous night. Not good! Had it been an actual fire, I might not be typing this blog post … and what a loss that would be. Ha!

All in all, a good time — and now, on to StellarCon!

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My MystiCon Schedule

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This weekend I’ll be in Roanoke, Virginia, for MystiCon.

I’m not an official guest, but I’ll still take part in a couple of panels:

  • This Is The End ‐ How and When to End A Series (Friday, 3 p.m.)
  • UFO Investigations (Saturday, 1 p.m.)

I’ll see if I can worm my way into anything else interesting. Safe travels!

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Great News! for Several Friends

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First, hearty congratulations to all my friends who garnered Nebula Award nominations! Several of the stories I nominated made the ballot (this was the first time I’ve been able to nominate, having recently upgraded my SFWA membership), and everyone on the list deserves a round of applause. The complete list is linked here, but I’m happiest for the folks I’ve gotten to know on-line or in-person — some very recently and some with whom I’ve been friends for several years — namely,

  • Mary Robinette Kowal, nominated for “Kiss Me Twice” (novella)
  • Kij Johnson, nominated for “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” (novella)
  • Ken Liu, nominated for “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (novella) and “The Paper Menagerie” (short story)
  • Rachel Swirsky, nominated for “Fields of Gold” (novelette)
  • Brad R. Torgersen, nominated for “Ray of Light” (novelette)
  • Ferrett Steinmetz, nominated for “Sauerkraut Station” (novelette)
  • Katherine Sparrow, nominated for “The Migratory Pattern of Dancers” (novelette)
  • Jake Kerr, nominated for “The Old Equations” (novelette)
  • Tom Crosshill, nominated for “Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son” (short story)
  • Aliette de Bodard, nominated for “Shipbirth” (short story)
  • Nancy Fulda, nominated for “Movement” (short story)
  • David W. Goldman, nominated for “The Axiom of Choice” (short story)

Now, of course, I have to figure out who I’m going to vote for. Along those lines, I’ll resurrect the line from my “Playing Politics” song: “I don’t know how much they’ll bribe me, I’ll just have to wait and see.”

Second, congratulations to my friend Jeff LaSala on the release of his Foreshadows project. (Full disclosure: Jeff and I are both slimy contractors for Baen Books.)


(Sample of Talon Dunning’s art for Foreshadows, from the Foreshadows web site.)

Foreshadows: The Ghost of Zero is an ambitious multi-media project combining original music, original fiction, and original artwork. Jeff, his brother, and several others collaborated on it, and the end result is very impressive.

I haven’t read many of the stories yet, but I’ve listened to all the music and it’s very evocative. (I admit that I’m not a big fan of “techno” and much of this music is of that style, but in terms of conveying the emotional undertones of the stories I think it works well.) My favorite of the songs is “Made in Brazil | Living in Japan.” The artwork, too, is extremely well done.

Check it out at http://foreshadows.net/!

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Monumental Space History: John Glenn and Friendship-7

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A half-century ago today — February 20, 1962 — John H. Glenn became the first U.S. citizen to orbit the Earth when he rode out of Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas rocket.


(Mercury-Atlas-6 launch. NASA image.)

Mission Mercury-Atlas-6 carried Glenn into a 162.2 x 100 mile altitude orbit. He circled the earth three times in the capsule he had named “Friendship-7.”


(John Glenn during the Friendship-7 space flight. NASA image.)

According to this Friendship-7 mission page,

During the flight only two major problems were encountered: (1) a yaw attitude control jet apparently clogged at the end of the first orbit, forcing the astronaut to abandon the automatic control system for the manual-electrical fly-by-wire system; and (2) a faulty switch in the heat shield circuit indicated that the clamp holding the shield had been prematurely released — a signal later found to be false. During reentry, however, the retropack was not jettisoned but retained as a safety measure to hold the heat shield in place in the event it had loosened.

Glenn and Friendship-7 spent almost 5 hours in space on this history-making journey.

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First Shuttle Captive-Carry Test

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Thirty-five years ago today — February 18, 1977 — NASA conducted the first captive-carry flight test of the Space Shuttle program, with the prototype orbiter Enterprise atop the 747 carrier aircraft.


(Shuttle prototype Enterprise during one of the captive-carry tests. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

After a series of taxi tests on the 15th, this was the first “inert” flight test of the approach and landing test program. The orbiter was powered down and no astronauts flew during this and the next four flights. The first “active” captive-carry flight took place on June 18, 1977, commanded by Apollo-13 lunar module pilot Fred Haise and piloted by Gordon Fullerton. Haise and Fullerton later flew the first glide test as well.

All of the shuttle flight tests took place at the Dryden Flight Research Facility at Edwards AFB. It was always cool to drive past Dryden on my way to and from the Rocket Lab, when we were stationed at Edwards in the late 80s.

If you want to see the Enterprise flight test vehicle, which has been on display for the last few years at the Udvar-Hazy annex to the National Air and Space Museum, it is supposed to be moved later this year to the Intrepid Air and Space Museum in New York.

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Studying Magnetic Storms in Space

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Five years ago today — February 17, 2007 — a Delta-II rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, carrying five nearly identical satellites on a mission to study magnetic field “substorms.”


(Artist’s concept of THEMIS in orbit. NASA image.)

The Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms, or THEMIS, spacecraft — in practical NASA fashion, designated THEMIS-1 through THEMIS-5 (or sometimes -A through -E) — were designed to “track the origins of substorms within the Earth’s magnetic field.” Energetic particles from such substorms cause the famed Northern and Southern Lights: the Aurorae Borealis and Australis, respectively.

The National Space Science Data Center page about THEMIS-1 describes the different mission phases and the unique orbits of the five spacecraft:

The mission consists of several phases. In the first phase, the spacecraft will all orbit as a tight cluster in the same orbital plane with apogee at 15.4 Earth radii (RE). In the second phase, also called the Dawn Phase, the satellites will be placed in their orbits and during this time their apogees will be on the dawn side of the magnetosphere. During the third phase (also known as the Tail Science Phase) the apogees will be in the magnetotail. The fourth phase is called the Dusk Phase or Radiation Belt Science Phase, with all apogees on the dusk side. In the fifth and final phase, the apogees will shift to the sunward side (Dayside Science Phase).

All five satellites will have similar perigee altitudes (1.16-1.5 Re) but varying apogee altitudes (P1: ~30 RE, P2: ~20 RE, P3 & P4: ~12 RE, P5: ~10RE) with corresponding orbital periods of ~4, 2, and 1 days, respectively. This results in multi-point magnetic conjunctions. Every four days the satellites will line up along the Earth’s magnetic tail with magnetic foot points in the North American sector, allowing the tracking of disturbances through different geospace regions from tail to ground.

The whole “magnetic storm” thing sounds science fiction-y, doesn’t it? But that makes it cool.

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