Tag Archives: launch

Space History: Third Space Shuttle Qualification Flight

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Thirty years ago today — March 22, 1982 — the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on the third “shakedown” flight of the shuttle program.


(STS-3 landing at White Sands, New Mexico. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Astronauts Jack R. Lousma and C. Gordon Fullerton crewed Columbia during the STS-3 mission. They checked out the shuttle’s systems and documented problems ranging from lost communication links to toilet malfunctions, from space sickness to sleep cycles interrupted by unexplained static.

The shuttle was scheduled to land at Edwards AFB, but the dry lake bed was actually too wet to accomodate a landing. High winds at the back-up landing site at White Sands, New Mexico, forced a one-day mission extension. Columbia landed there on March 30th — the only time a shuttle ever landed at White Sands.

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Gravity and Environment

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Ten years ago today — March 17, 2002 — two Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment spacecraft were launched from Plesetsk on a Rockot booster.


(GRACE-1 and GRACE-2. NASA image.)

GRACE-1, nicknamed “Tom,” and GRACE-2, nicknamed “Jerry,” were identical satellites, part of a joint U.S.-German mission “to obtain accurate global and high-resolution values of both the static and time-variable components of the Earth’s gravitational field.” Part of the mission involved mapping the tiny variations in gravity caused by environmental changes such as ice formation and melting, glacier movements, and changes in sea level.

// Break, Break //

Ten years earlier, on Saint Patrick’s Day 1992, Russia’s Soyuz TM-14 launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying cosmonauts Aleksandr S. Viktorenko and Aleksandr Y. Kaleri and German astronaut Klaus-Dietrich Flade to the Mir space station.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

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Kosmos-1

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Fifty years ago today — March 16, 1962 — the Soviet Union launched the first of its “Kosmos” series spacecraft from Kapustin Yar.


(Model of a later Dnepropetrovsk Sputnik spacecraft. Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Kosmos-1, so named because of the Kosmos launch vehicle, was a technology demonstrator intended to study the ionosphere. It was actually the third spacecraft of the Dnepropetrovsk Sputnik series, but was called Kosmos-1 because it was the first to successfully reach space.

Also known as “Cosmos-1,” this half-century-old satellite should not be confused with the Cosmos-1 solar sail attempt made in June 2005.

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Early European Space Observatory

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Forty years ago today — March 11, 1972 — the European TD-1A satellite launched from Vandenberg AFB atop a Thor-Delta rocket. The satellite’s “TD” designation was actually taken from the Thor-Delta launch system.


(TD-1A satellite. NASA image.)

TD-1A was Europe’s first three-axis-stabilized spacecraft, designed “to make a systematic sky survey in the ultraviolet and high-energy regions of the spectrum.” Two instruments pointed at the sun and measured its x-ray and gamma ray output; five other instruments scanned the sky to measure “ultraviolet, x and gamma rays, and heavy nuclei.”

More information on TD-1A is available on its page in the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center.

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Six-in-One for the Space Test Program

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Five years ago today — March 9, 2007 — an Atlas V rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, carrying a half-dozen small satellites for the military’s Space Test Program.


(Space Test Program Atlas V launch. United Launch Alliance image, linked from http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2007/q1/070309a_pr.html.)

The six satellites launched were

  • FalconSat 3, a 54 kg picosatellite built by USAF Academy cadets to “monitor ambient plasma” and test a “micropropulsion attitude control system”
  • STPSat 1, a 158 kg microsatellite to “collect atmospheric data and demonstrate spacecraft technology advances”
  • OE-NEXTSAT, a 226 kg minisatellite built “to test capabilities for autonomous rendezvous, refueling and component replacement”
  • OE-ASTRO, a 952 kg satellite built, like OE-NEXTSAT, to “test capabilities for autonomous rendezvous, refueling, and component replacement”
  • MidSTAR 1, a 118 kg microsatellite to test electrochemical membranes for NASA and a microdosimeter for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute
  • CFESat, a 156 kg microsatellite built by Los Alamos National Laboratory to test advanced technology including an on-board supercomputer

The Space Test Program is part of the Air Force’s Space Development and Test Directorate.

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A Half Century of Solar Science

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Fifty years ago today — March 7, 1962 — the first Orbiting Solar Observatory launched from Cape Canaveral on a Thor Delta rocket.


(Orbiting Solar Observatory 1. NASA image.)

OSO-1

was the first satellite to have pointed instruments and onboard tape recorders for data storage. The OSO 1 platform consisted of a sail section, which pointed two experiments continuously toward the sun, supplying power to the experiments from the solar batteries and rechargeable chemical batteries; and a wheel section, which spun about an axis perpendicular to the pointing direction of the sail and carried seven experiments.

More information on OSO-1 is available from NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC).

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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!

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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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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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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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