Really Rocket Science

The Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) has been offline since June 19, Space.com reports:

ngineers have yet to figure out what caused the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to go into "safe mode," essentially a sleep state that prevents normal operations. But the outlook is bright.

"We’re very optimistic" that the camera will be fixed, said Ed Ruitberg, associate program manager for Hubble at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Ruitberg told SPACE.com that some potential causes have been ruled out and that the problem is likely with a low-voltage power supply interface, something between the batteries and a camera component. If that’s the case, then redundant electronics can be relied on to bypass the problem area.

"We’re still investigating the problem and working on all sorts of contingencies," said Max Mutchler at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, where Hubble’s science operations are run. "We’re hoping for the best but preparing for other contingencies."

UPI files the report:

The Delta II rocket launched Wednesday at Cape Canaveral carried a pair of small satellites for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Micro-Satellite Technology Experiment. The program looks into new spacecraft technologies that could be applied to future military space projects.

Boeing and its crew of subcontractors reported Thursday that the Delta II in its 7925-9.5 configuration performed flawlessly with the payload deploying some 30 minutes after launch in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles above the equator….

The rocket was equipped with nine GEM-40 solid-fuel booster rockets that augmented liftoff thrust to 850,000 pounds to which another 450,000 pounds was added three minutes downrange.

 

The New Scientist reports:

The US military is preparing to launch two technology demonstration satellites on Wednesday, collectively known as the Micro-satellite Technology Experiment (Mitex).

The craft will launch aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, US. The launch window lasts from 1734 to 2134 EDT (2134 to 0134 GMT on 22 June).

The micro-satellites will test a range of technologies for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the US Air Force and the US Navy. These include avionics, advanced communications, fuels that spontaneously ignite on contact, solar cells and new software. No further details of the technologies are available.

DARPA is interested in investigating the capabilities of small satellites, says DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker. One particular focus of the mission is reducing the mass of equipment by using lightweight materials….

he technologies could have been tested with a single satellite, but because the demonstrator mission has few back-up systems and little pre-flight testing, DARPA decided to split the payload in two to maximise their chances of success.

It’s not just small satellites being tested:

The mission will also be the first flight test of an experimental rocket upper stage for the US Naval Research Laboratory. The upper stage will lift the satellites on the final leg of their journey into geosynchronous orbit.

Some of stage’s new features include: lightweight titanium propellant tanks with internal propellant management devices; novel attitude control thrusters; and solar cells with three semi-conducting layers to more efficiently convert sunlight into electricity.

 A larger version of the Mitex launch components diagram can be found here.

There’s little doubt that satellite technology has transformed aviation. From the widespread use of GPS technology to the in-flight weather updates provided to pilots through services like XM Satellite Weather, satellite-delivered content and information has greatly increased the situational awareness of pilots and, in turn, made aviation safer.

Yet any gadget is only as useful as the underlying information, which is why the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Stereo Airfield Collection program has awarded Dulles-based GeoEye a $3.7 million contract to image 365 airfields and produce Airport Mapping Databases (AMDB) over a 12-month period:

GeoEye is now the world’s largest developer of airport geospatial information support, terrain and obstacle databases with several hundred airfields mapped to date. Matt O’Connell, GeoEye’s president and chief executive officer said, "We are a leader in providing airport geospatial solutions to key customers like the NGA and the USAF at the best price and with the best performance in the industry."

An Airport Mapping Database is a geospatial database that contains significant features of an airport such as runways, taxiways, buildings, obstacles and terrain surrounding an airfield. This information supports the safe movement of aircraft and helicopters on runways and taxiways. These products can also be used to support training, mission or contingency planning and visual simulations for ordinary operations or crisis situations. GeoEye is uniquely positioned to fulfill this contract for North American and international airfields by virtue of its IKONOS satellite’s ability to generate a three-dimensional image from stereo data collected during a single orbital pass. The result is a three-dimensional map-accurate image of an airport that can be quickly and cost effectively acquired.

"There’s a new crater on the Moon. It’s about 14 meters wide, 3 meters deep and precisely one month, [sixteen] days old," NASA reports:

NASA astronomers watched it form: "On May 2, 2006, a meteoroid hit the Moon’s Sea of Clouds (Mare Nubium) with 17 billion joules of kinetic energy—that’s about the same as 4 tons of TNT," says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. "The impact created a bright fireball which we video-recorded using a 10-inch telescope."

Lunar impacts have been seen before–"stuff hits the Moon all the time," notes Cooke–but this is the best-ever recording of an explosion in progress.

"The video plays in 7x slow motion; otherwise the explosion would be nearly invisible to the human eye. "The duration of the fireball was only four-tenths of a second," says Cooke.

Expanding on NooBee’s post (below) about the Oklahoma Spaceport, several pieces of news from last week are of interest to those closely following the growth of space tourism and its infrastructure.

"The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CCAS) is laying the groundwork here for the rules to govern flights out of Spaceport Singapore, a planned $115 million (SGD $191 million) project to offer suborbital spaceflights and a host of other experiences to adventure-seeking tourists," Space.com reports: 

Slated to open in 2009, Spaceport Singapore is the brainchild of a consortium of investors and the Virginia-based adventure tourism firm Space Adventures, which announced the project – alongside plans for a United Arab Emirates spaceport and a fleet of suborbital Explorer spacecraft– earlier this year.

Space Adventures and its chief competitor, Virgin Galactic have disputed claims that they are in a "new space race" for tourist dollars. Nonetheless its difficult for observers to refrain from comparing their progress on both spacecraft and spaceports.

Or at least, it’s hard for us to refrain, and we read with interest news reports last week that the state of New Mexico has chosen a Los Angeles firm to design and engineer the new spaceport in the Land of Enchantment. 

Virgin Galactic also revealed design details of its SpaceShipTwo craft last week. Observers wonder
if changes to the craft’s rocket fuel and apogee indicate the possibility of Virgin Galactic pursuing point-to-point suborbital travel.

Finally, the company that bills itself as "the SouthWest Airlines of outer space" reports that one of its customers, Seattle-based ZG Aerospace, is offering to send business cards into space this summer for $50 each.

Who said space tourism wouldn’t be available to the masses? 

Blaring in an above-the-fold headline on the Drudge Report yesterday and making its way around the blogosphere today is world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking’s statement during a press conference that humans must colonize space to survive. The AP reports:

 Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.

"We won’t find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who arrived in Hong Kong to a rock star’s welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for today were sold out.

He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

The 64-year-old scientist — author of the global bestseller A Brief History of Time — uses a wheelchair and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Hawking said he’s teaming up with his daughter to write a children’s book about the universe, aimed at the same age group as the Harry Potter books.

Times are tough for Staten Island’s famous high-tech Teleport, according to the Staten Island Advance.

Billed as one of the region’s most secure communications centers for businesses, the 100-acre corporate campus has faced scepticism– and recurring difficulty attracting tenants– since it first opened in the 1980s. A New York Times article from 1988 reports:

The root of the problem is that office development is the secondary focus of the Teleport, a joint venture of Merrill Lynch, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the City of New York and the Western Union Corporation.

The project’s centerpiece is an 11-acre field dotted by 14 satellite dishes. A concrete parapet 50 feet high surrounds the field to reduce electronic interference, and fiber-optic cables beam the satellite transmissions to companies throughout the New York metropolitan region.

But companies have been slow to sign on. The Teleport, in the northwest corner of Staten Island, about eight miles southwest of the ferry to Manhattan, has suffered from a stigma of being too far off the track. Although modest bus service exists, the Teleport is essentially a suburban project designed around the automobile.

For top executives of Manhattan companies with employees who rely on mass transit, the automobile orientation has killed the Teleport as a potential site for computer or back-office operations.

10 years later, during the dot-com boom, the Teleport was at the height of its success and occupancy rate– in large part because of the secure satellite and landline communication facilities it offered. The future looked bright for the "Teleport" model:

The Teleport Communications Group…  built a satellite "infield" in the park that connected to a master control center. The center operates a fiber-optic network connecting all the new buildings in the teleport park and extends into Manhattan and Brooklyn. Primarily, the infrastructure allows companies to operate their mainframe data centers or have secure sites for servers and vital network equipment.

The Port Authority began to promote the unique characteristics of the world’s very first teleport to businesses that required access to broadband communications. It’s $70 million gamble has paid off and continues to deliver dividends. Today there are five fully leased buildings at the Staten Island site with rent above market rates. More than 2,100 people are employed in new jobs at the teleport, in industries including computer operations, communications, security, building services, back office functions and telecommunications.

The New York City teleport model is being followed in cities worldwide. In fact, experts say there may be as many as 200 of these new ports in existence by the year 2005.

But now, according to the Staten Island Advance, the Teleport looks less like the future than it does a ghost town:

Industry experts and developers say the troubling numbers here are skewed by the Port Authority-managed Teleport in Bloomfield, which recently lost its signature satellite dishes and where two buildings are completely empty. The worker population has dropped from a high of more than 3,000 in the late 1990s to 1,000 today.

New investments are being made to keep the Teleport’s high-tech infrastructure up to date. But will that be enough to lure companies back out to Staten Island?

Only time will tell. 

Humans have long imagined the stars as the place where loved ones reside after their deaths. Now the spiritual metaphor can become reality, thanks to a Japanese firm’s plans to give people a boost to heaven:

A venture business here is offering people the chance to get closer to space by launching a personal satellite business allowing customers to send ashes or photos of loved ones up into orbit for as long as 30 years.

The service is being provided by Yokohama-based firm Astro Research. The satellites are cube-shaped, measuring 25 cm to a side, inside which the memorabilia can be stored.

The satellites will be launched into space from overseas, and will orbit the earth at an altitude of between 600 and 800 kilometers for about 30 years. For several years customers will able to confirm their positions by radio….

But there is a catch — the price tag of the service is 100 million yen. For most people, that will make the cost of sending their memories into outer space astronomical. 

Sort of brings a whole new meaning to the notion that the deceased are looking down on you, now doesn’t it? 

Is Sirius looking to expand its product offerings? That’s the question that lingers between the lines in yesterday’s news reports that Sirius has agreed to a $260 million contract with Space Systems/Loral to launch a fourth satellite:

 Loral Space & Communications Ltd.’s (LORL) Space Systems/Loral unit, which built Sirius’s three existing in-orbit satellites and a fourth back-up satellite in storage, is constructing the new satellite – the FM-5. It is slated for completion in the fourth quarter of 2008. Once completed, the satellite will be launched on a Proton rocket under an existing contract with International Launch Service.

Sirius said the new satellite will help enhance overall coverage, particularly for stationary applications at home or in the office. Unlike the company’s current satellites, which travel in a figure-eight pattern above and below the equator that is known as an "elliptical geosynchronous orbit," the FM-5 will stay in a fixed position above the earth – a "geostationary orbit." Sirius said having a satellite in the different orbit will complement existing coverage. Rival XM Satellite Radio Inc. (XMSR) has all of its satellites in geostationary orbits.

With this new satellite, Sirius and XM will have the same number of satellites. XM is currently building a fourth satellite that is expected to launch in the second half of the year. It also has a spare under construction that is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2007.

A good explanation of how Sirius’ current satellite system works can be found here. Bell Labs did some work for Sirius (see here), and the question on analysts’ minds is whether the new geosynchronous satellite signals (no pun intended) an intention by Sirius to move into the market of providing video as well as radio to cars and buses. 

Time will tell.