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Courtney n5bf-at-amsat-dot-org most recent update 2012 March 9 earlier update 2005 July 14 |
My
Job Jet Propulsion Laboratory a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) run for NASA by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Mariner Art: This is the first spacecraft picture of Mars ever received on earth. Arriving at 8.3 bits per second, the guys printed out the data as numbers on slips of paper, then colored each number according to its value, then carefully glued the stips together. "Real" pictures were made by computers later, but this was the first.  GPS Waveforms for CoNNeCT - coming The Low Mass Radio Science Transponder - Satellite (LMRST-SAT) concept:  So one day at lunch Jim Lux (W6RMK) said we should do a CubeSat mission on B & P (Bid and Proposal) money (a few $10K) and suggested that RSTI (Radio Science Transponder Instrument) needed a TRL (Technology Readiness Level) raising ride. Thoughts on CubeSats in the Big Space world. I took the idea and proposed to the DRDF (Director's Research and Development Fund) to do this in partnership with the Space Systems Development Lab (SSDL)at Stanford University, asking for $200K. They gave me $175K we built a 2U CubeSat that could be flown. The DRDF money only buildt the spacecraft, it didn't get it flight tested or launched. Part of what you are supposed to do on DRDFs is to go get money for "follow on" work which, in this case would be environmental testing, launch, and space operations. ATLO. I don't have that yet, but am working on leads. We may have a launch in summer 2012. Matt Dennis and I built"flight" unit in part on some of the RSTI development money, which was a big relief. So, we can't really do it on B&P money, but we're within an order of magnitude so far. Somehow, in the original proposal process, the name got changed from RSTI to LMRST (Low Mass Radio Science Transponder). The kids at Stanford started calling it "LMRST Sat" pronounced "Elmer Sat." Funny connection back to ham radio there, but when I went to Stanford for a meeting and I was older than any two of the other people in the room put together, I thought it would take too much explaining to make the quip. Maybe later in the project. Yeah, I guess I'm the "Elmer" now....  GRAIL I'm in the Tracking Systems and Applications organization where I work mostly on GRAIL GRAIL sends two spacecraft to the moon, like GRACE sent two spacecraft to the earth. The two spacecraft orbit close to their planet and measure the distance between themselves to microns (millionths of a meter) as they go. From this information the precise gravitational structure of the planet can be inferred. For GRACE at earth, the measurements are so precise that seasonal changes in the water table can be detected, along with other gravitational phenomena like mountain ranges and deep sea trenches. At the moon the goals are to study the crust and its history and (the "Holy Grail" of the mission, so to speak) see if we can deduce something about the solid/liquid composition of the moon's core. This data will be thousands of times better than the previous Apollo data, especially on the back side where Apollo had no direct tracking. Using a lot of cleverness, the mission spends a few months (instead of 3-1/2 days) to reach the moon, for a little less energy than the direct Apollo approach. It's supposed to arrive around New Year's Day of 2012 (the first craft on 12/31/11 and the second on 1/1/12) and do it's science in three one-month global mapping sessions. This knowledge will also improve future navigation of the moon (like by astronauts) from the kilometer level to a few meters, important if you want to land on, not merely "near" the landing pad. Meanwhile, other people continue to work on explorations such as the Mars Exploration Rovers that are in the seventh year of a planned 90 day mission at two sites on Mars looking for signs of water or life, ancient or even modern. Anything that blocks the sun to these solar-powered robots could yet be their Achilles Heel. Mars Science Lab and Volkswagon Beetle sized nuclear powered Mars rover has been delayed two years, causing consternation at JPL and all the way to the highest levels of government. The Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn 2004 June 30 with a perfect orbit insertion burn. My favorite is the navigation page with simulated views where you can see what Cassini sees and its current location in the Saturn System. I continue to follow with interests the exploits of the Space Frontier Foundation inspired space upstarts such as Space X, led by Elon Musk of PayPal fame. They finally got something all the way into orbit on their fourth try last year. Last fall I visited their Hawthorne facility as a potential customer for Dragonlab. There's also Scaled Composites that won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 by flying the mass of three humans (including one real human) to over 100 km altitude in the same vehicle twice in two weeks. There was an accident at the plant in summer 2007 that has slowed them down some, but they are still working with Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic (also Virgin Atlantic) to take half a dozen paying customers ($200,000 a seat) over 100 kilometers into near-space for a few minutes of weightlessness and sightseeing. Elon, commenting on Burt, says that the SpaceShipOne / SpaceShipTwo type suborbital adventures only get 1.5% of the way to earth orbit, where any action really starts, earth orbit being half way to anywhere in the universe, by energy. My own calculation says 3% (just 2gh / v^2 for 100 km suborbital height and 8 km / second orbital speed) but who's quibbling? There is a (relatively friendly) tension between the government and private enterprise about all this. There is a perception that space flight is so complicated and expensive that only governments can do it and everyone has grown so used to this that the real perception is that only governments are allowed to do space flight. Without real competition, places like NASA end up thinking things like "Safety is Job One" is somehow a priority in the space exploration endeavor, incongruous as that sounds on the face of it. Sure, safety is important, but if we want to guarantee absolute safety of everybody everywhere, we wouldn't be fooling around with rockets and high explosives at all. Private enterprise, after many false starts and missed promises is finally getting off the ground, however. Their problem is that they need a paying market of some sort. True enough, NASA can ligthen up and just pay for things rather than doing them, as one example of how to "privatize", but that's still government money. After the big communications constellation bust last decade (Iridium, Globalstar, etc.) they (folks like the Space Frontier Foundation) are now thinking that space tourism is where the money might be. True enough, several people have shelled out $20 million to fly to space stations as private citizens, and there is a larger market for cheaper tickets. Would you pay $190K for a three minute sub-orbital flight after three days of training? Would you be surprised to learn that that's about what participation in an expedition to Mt. Everest costs? We call this private enterprise versus government thing "furry mammals scurrying around the feet of dinosaurs." Now we're in an economic ice age. Who knows what will happen? The tension is best summed up in the flight day quip, "SpaceShipOne, GovernmentZero" which, though a bit of a low blow, is indeed accurate. My own feeling is that I want somebody to explore space and get a real start moving people off the planet. Working as a builder and navigator of solar system robots at JPL, I still see plenty of personal action and contribute toward that goal. Recent Resume - Awards - Publications Examples of older work: GPS/MET Instrument Configuration - Here I designed a method for a GPS equipped satellite to schedule and perform its own atmospheric soundings of the GPS signals without ground intervention. Other space - GPS work involved conceiving, developing, and implementing techniques such as Single Antenna Attitude Determination.  This is my "Silver Snoopy".
Members of the STS-99 SRTM team (see "Resume"
above) were awarded these for ... well, for pulling it off.
Except for this radar, JPL usually has little to do with the Space
Shuttle or manned space flight. Shuttles occasionally land in
California, however. One day when I didn't realize this was
happening there was a double knock at the door. I got up and
answered to find no one there. Shuttle sonic boom on final into
Edwards....
The flowers are a dozen yellow roses that Viannah, on the occasion of her first paycheck from Von's grocery (a summer job) gave Viann, her mother, (2004 June 26). A "Silver Snoopy" is a high award at NASA, comparable to but even cooler than the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, “for leading the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Global Positioning System design, development, test, and delivery task.” May 7, 2001 (the citation on mine), that some of us got for the same job. The "Silver Snoopy" was commissioned from Charles Schultz, creator of Peanuts, by the astronaut corps, is in limited supply, and must be presented in person by an astronaut. Mine was presented by John M. Grunsfeld who did not fly on SRTM. Rather, he happened to be the next astronaut to make a state visit to JPL after these particular awards were approved. Grunsfeld is famous as (maybe) the last astronaut to repair the Hubble Space Telescope (STS-109). That's Snoopy sitting by his box, the only time he's ever been out. (They warned us not to put these on e-bay, so don't ask.)  Here I am trying to put him back in his box. A few thoughts on the notion that people might go to Mars affordably by planning not to come back. An analog of travel to Mars with the discovery of America was that the very first explorers and surveyors did go planning to come back and typically did, with some pain. But it wasn't long before there were settlers, typically middle class folks, who cashed out their lives and moved to the new world expecting never to return. A couple of centuries after that, there were people who were coming to America planning to make their fortune and return home. As they got old, living crop to crop, they began to realize that they would not be going home. This is the origin of the "Prairie Home Cemetery," the place where first generation "settlers" are buried. Of course, their children always thought they lived here. This is the "Prairie Home" in "Prairie Home Companion." In spring 2009 I visited Space-X in Hawthorne, CA, representing small payloads for upcoming launch opportunities and asked a question of Elon Musk that got an answer that agrees with Buzz Aldrin on this topic. Apparently there is discussion of one way planetary trips in the futurist community. Elon stated that the goal of Space-X is to "enable a spacefaring civilization." So, after a bunch of questions relevant to biology experiments, I said (showing my JPL colors...), "When you talk about 'spacefaring civilization' I think of leaving the earth. What is your long term plan in this respect?" He quipped the real answer first, "One step at a time..." which was met with general laughter. But he does have a plan in this form: "If you look way, way out, when the price of a one way trip (my emphasis) to Mars is about the cost of your house, say $2,000,000 (we presume that Elon owns a slightly nicer house than we), there are people who would move there. It's not for everybody, indeed, it's not for most people, but there will be enough people [like the Mayflower folks] who will cash out and move to Mars permanently to make it a viable business." Note that this is also a major theme in the Red Mars / Green Mars / Blue Mars trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson. The first trip is a round trip, but quickly thereafter they start sending people with the intent of enabling colonization, then colonizing. (Late in the trilogy, a crises on earth allows Mars to declare independence and become their own nation-planet?. Robinson gets huge leeway to discuss any set of topics he wants through this device -- politics, soil science, astrodynamics, geriatrics, you name it.) You get to phases where there are always trips in progress in both directions, kind of like the trans-Atlantic traffic of the 18th and 19th centuries. ... and today. This is something of a paradigm shift from Martian Chronicles. I think the big holdup right now is the perceived resource situation. The people on the Mayflower were expecting grass and trees and small animals and water and air and other things that they were used to consuming to be there for the taking when they arrived. There is not a big resource draw to Mars or someplace like that yet. If there were, Exxon would already be there, as we say. Ironically, the resources expected by the Mayflower people failed them. Most of them died the first winter, partly due to poor planning, but largely due to bad luck with the weather. The first settlers on Mars might do better. Who knows? Deer at the Cardiac Gate  courtney dot duncan at ieee.org (c) Courtney Duncan 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011 |