Mariner-10's Farewell to Mercury

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On March 16, 1975 — 35 years ago today — the Mariner-10 spacecraft made its last flyby of Mercury.


(Mariner-10. NASA image.)

This was also its closest flyby, passing within 327 km (203 mi) of the planet. On this flyby, Mariner-10 discovered that Mercury has an intrinsic magnetic field.

Mariner-10 was the first spacecraft to visit two planets, and the first to use a gravity-assist maneuver in a “slingshot” around Venus to reach Mercury. The mission succeeded despite some difficulties, however. One problem the mission encountered was of special interest to spacecraft designers in the future:

A trajectory correction maneuver was made 10 days after launch. Immediately following this manuever the star-tracker locked onto a bright flake of paint which had come off the spacecraft and lost lock on the guide star Canopus. An automated safety protocol recovered Canopus, but the problem of flaking paint recurred throughout the mission.

Another first for the mission occurred when an attitude control problem used up excessive propellant. Mission planners devised a never-before-used procedure to “use … solar wind on the solar panels to orient the spacecraft.”

Since 1975, when the last of its attitude control propellant was used up, Mariner-10 has remained in orbit around the sun.

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First U.S. Astronaut Launched Out of Baikonur

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Fifteen years ago today — March 14, 1995 — U.S. astronaut Norman Thagard launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on mission Soyuz TM-21, along with Russian cosmonauts Gennady Strekalov and Vladimir Dezhurov.


(Soyuz TM-21 mission patch. The annotation at the top refers not to the Soyuz launch, but to Mir space station expedition EO-18. Creative Commons image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Thagard was the first NASA astronaut to launch on a Russian rocket, and then the first American to stay aboard the Mir space station.

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RavenCon Panels Workshop

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Yesterday I got my schedule for Ravencon, which is coming up in April in Richmond, Virginia.

I will be part of a workshop entitled “Pitching Your Work and Writing a Query Letter,” in which I expect I’ll share a horror story or two from the last few years of slush reading. In addition, I’ll be on five panels:

  • Making the Science Fit the Story
  • The Pen is Mightier Than The … (Moderator)
  • Will there be BBQ’s in Space?
  • What does the future hold for space travel?
  • Blogging, Twittering, —ings: Are They Productive Time or An Addiction? (Moderator)

Being the moderator of a panel about blogging, it seemed appropriate to post this on the blog.

Since I missed StellarCon last weekend, RavenCon will be my first con of the season. I had a lot of fun last year, except for the ill-fated trip to the restaurant-which-shall-not-be-named across the street. But the con is in a new hotel this year, so I think it’ll be even better! I look forward to seeing some old friends and making a few new ones.

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Another Space Pioneer, a Half Century Past

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Fifty years ago today — March 11, 1960 — the Pioneer-5 space probe launched from Cape Canaveral atop a Thor-Able rocket.


(Pioneer-5 with its solar power panels extended. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Pioneer-5 was one of the first deep space missions, and achieved a heliocentric (sun-centered) orbit between Earth and Venus. Scientists maintained contact with the vehicle for 106 days and received signals from a distance of 36.2 million kilometers (22.5 million miles), the farthest distance achieved at that time in the space race. Telemetry received from Pioneer-5 confirmed the existence of the interplanetary magnetic field, which until then had been just theoretical.

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Eight-in-One Launch, With a Repeater

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Today in space history, 45 years ago — March 9, 1965 — a Thor-Agena D-model rocket launched eight satellites at once from Vandenberg AFB.


(A 1962 Thor-Agena-D launch. USAF image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Not only was it the first time eight spacecraft had been launched at the same time, but one of those satellites — Oscar-3 — was the first solar-powered amateur radio repeater in orbit. More than a thousand amateur radio operators in 22 countries around the world used Oscar-3 (Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) for 18 days before its transponder failed.

You can read more about Oscar-3 and amateur satellite radio on this page.

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Space History, 95 Years Ago

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Most people know about NASA, even though some may be hard pressed to recite what it stands for: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I suspect many people forget about, or may not even know about, its predecessor, the NACA, established by Congress on this day in history, 1915.


(Monochrome NACA logo, from Wikimedia Commons.)

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had very humble beginnings.

Congress founded NACA on 3 March 1915, as an independent government agency reporting directly to the President. Its enacting legislation was attached as a rider to the Naval Appropriation Bill for that year. Unlike NASA, NACA began almost without anyone noticing. It started simply, with a chairman, Brigadier General George Scriven, chief of the Army’s Signal Corps, a main committee of 12 members representing the government, military, and industry, an executive committee with 7 members, chosen from the main committee, and one employee, John F. Victory. Committee members were not paid and served only in an advisory capacity, meeting a few times a year to direct the aim of the new organization. Initially, the task of the committee was to coordinate efforts already underway across the nation. However, its mission and workforce soon grew to cover a greater role in aeronautics research in the U.S.

And, grew into the NASA we know today.

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Ultraviolet ENDEAVOUR

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Fifteen years ago today — March 2, 1995 — Space Shuttle Endeavour launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-67.


(Astro-2 telescope in the cargo bay during the STS-67 mission. Note the constellation Orion in the right side of the picture. NASA image from the University of Virginia web site.)

Astronauts Stephen S. Oswald, William G. Gregory, Tamara E. Jernigan, John M. Grunsfeld, Wendy B. Lawrence, Ronald A. Parise, and Samuel T. Durrance spent 16 days in orbit making observations with the Ultraviolet Astronomy 2 (Astro-2) Telescope, including the “first ultraviolet images of the entire Moon.”


(Astro-2 UV image of the moon, compared to a visible light image, from mission STS-67. NASA image from the University of Virginia web site.)

STS-67 was the longest shuttle mission to date, and also the

first advertised shuttle mission connected to the Internet. Users of more than 200,000 computers from 59 countries logged on to Astro-2 home page at Marshall Space Flight Center; more than 2.4 million requests were recorded during mission, many answered by crew on-orbit.

And now you can read about it … on the Internet.

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Atlantis in Orbit

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Twenty years ago, in 1990, the Space Shuttle Atlantis was in orbit on mission STS-36. It had launched on the Department of Defense mission on February 28, during a classified launch window.


(Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, taken from Atlantis on STS-36. NASA image.)

Astronauts John O. Creighton, John H. Casper, David C. Hilmers, Richard M. Mullane, and Pierre J. Thuot deployed a classified payload shortly after reaching orbit, and landed at Edwards Air Force Base on March 4th.

(Personal note: We were still at Edwards AFB at the time, but I don’t remember if I saw that landing. I was not on the recovery team for it.)

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Vote for Gray! (The Anti-Candidate Lives)

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After much soul-searching and “counting the cost,” I have decided NOT to file as a candidate for the 2010 election primary. (Today is the deadline.) Instead, I will continue making snide observations about the candidates and the process, and as the Anti-Candidate I remain available for any write-in votes you want to cast.

(East view of the U.S. Capitol. U.S. Government photo. Click to enlarge.)

I received a lot of encouragement from folks, and I appreciate everyone’s confidence and general enthusiasm. I especially appreciate the offers of office space and other support. Maybe next time….

I made the decision based on four practical considerations. First, I don’t have any spare time to devote to the actual work of campaigning, not while I’m working two jobs and spending most of my off hours on church matters. Second, I haven’t built an organization capable of running a campaign, spreading the word, and getting out the vote. Third, owing to the lack of an organization, I don’t have any campaign funds to pay for things like the campaign filing fee. And finally, there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of candidates already in position, each of whom has more time, more of an organization, and more money than I do. So, from a practical standpoint, it made sense to sit this one out.

Some folks really seem to want me to run for office, and maybe one day I will. In the meantime, if you want to get an idea of where I stand on the issues, I’ll let you know as soon as I figure that out. (Actually, I’ve posted some issue-related ramblings on the Anti-Campaign pages.)

And if you don’t like the choices set before you on election day (or primary day), and can’t decide which one(s) you should vote against, feel free to vote against all of them by writing in my name!

(I’m Gray Rinehart, and I approved this message.)

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It's a planet! Or, it was.

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Eighty years ago today — February 18, 1930 — astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, discovered Pluto.


(Hubble Space Telescope image of Pluto and its moons, Charon, Nix and Hydra. NASA image.)

Pluto is about 39 times as far from the sun as Earth is. Its average distance from the sun is about 3,647,240,000 miles (5,869,660,000 kilometers). Pluto travels around the sun in an elliptical (oval-shaped) orbit. At some point in its orbit, it comes closer to the sun than Neptune, the outermost planet. It stays inside Neptune’s orbit for about 20 Earth years. This event occurs every 248 Earth years, which is about the same number of Earth years it takes Pluto to travel once around the sun.

Many of us grew up knowing Pluto as a planet: a cold, distant planet but a planet nonetheless. Now, thanks to the inexorable forward march of scientific progress, Pluto is no longer a planet in its own right. It’s too small, the critics said, to fit the definition. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union named Pluto a “dwarf planet.”

But, Pluto does have the distinction of being the largest (so far) of the Kuiper Belt Objects, those far-flung chunks of whatever that orbit the far reaches of our solar system. And, as such, it is the namesake of a class of celestial objects known as “plutoids.” So, little Pluto got some redemption after being stripped of its title.

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