Selected Articles from the
November 1998 Odyssey
Editor: Norm Cook
T-Minus Thirty-Six Years...
By Steve Bartlett
"We're going to Florida!" my wife said.
"Huh?" I replied with my usual eloquence.
"We're going to Florida in October to see the John Glenn launch," she
said. "They just announced it on the news. You were seven months late
for the last one, so here's your chance!"
I mustered my now-famous blank stare. "John Glenn launch? On the Shuttle?
Ah, um... okay." I reached for the phone book to call a nearby psychiatric
hospital. I knew that she was near the edge when she married me. This
just proved it. Now to humor her until the boys in the white coats arrived.
"Yeah," she said, looking for some signs of intelligent life on my face.
"We've got the parking pass. So we'll be able to see it from the five-mile
limit. Oh, and here's the bill for the plane tickets!"
She handed me a credit card receipt with far-too-many zeros on it. Maybe
there was space in that padded cell for two, I thought. Maybe she'd just
inhaled a bit too much of the fumes in the lab where she worked. A credit
card debt isn't legal if the person who made the charge was "under the
influence," was it?
"Look," she said, "you've been hooked on space since you were a kid.
(And sometimes I think you have vacuum on the brain.) Now's your chance
to see a Shuttle launch and watch history in the making."
She did have a point, I conceded. But if she combs her hair just right....
Then she turned on the radio to the local news station. "The first American
to orbit the earth... flying on the Space Shuttle in October," the announcer
intoned. "Mmmm, these nouns are chewy!" I said as I ate my words.
Eight months later we found ourselves on that five-mile mark, along
with a few hundred thousand other people, half the world's media, and
various Florida fauna. (How close was that ėgator going to get to the
crowd? Hmmm.) The Shuttle sat in the distance on launch pad 39B, shining
in the sun.
On the drive in from Orlando that morning, we'd been stopped several
times by NASA security and Brevard county sheriffs deputies, each of them
checking for that all-important parking pass. They were on high alert
for possible terrorist activity. I figured that now was a bad time to
bring up my hobby of high powered rocketry and kept my mouth shut.
The NASA public affairs folks had been kind enough to provide numerous
PA speakers around the parking areas, giving us all a "play-by-play" of
what was happening aboard Discovery and at Mission Control. Several helicopters
and T-38 jets circled the area uneasily, looking for prey. ("Do helicopters
eat tourists?" I wondered.)
As the countdown approached zero, it finally hit me: "I'm here! The
place where people go into space! coooollll!!!!!" (I can be a little slow
at times.)
Then the Shuttle rose above the water and the vegetation, sitting on
a long pillar of smoke and fire. Into the clearest, bluest sky I'd ever
seen it fly. A few seconds later the sound reached us, pounding the air
in our chests. ("Whoa! Great special effects!" I thought.) We watched
the twin solid rocket boosters drop away. The Orbiter and external tank
continued their journey and we lost track of them as the glow of the engines
faded into the sky.
As we packed up for the long drive back, I asked my wife, "So, what
do we do for an encore?" She smiled and said, "I came up with this. Now
it's your turn!"
I knew that I had my work cut out for me.
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1998 Mars Orbiter, Lander, Microprobes Set for Launch
NASA embarks on a return trip to Mars this winter with two spacecraft
launches that will first send an orbiter to circle the red planet, then
follow with another to land near the edge of Mars's south polar cap. Piggybacking
on the lander will be two small probes that will smash into the Martian
surface to test new technologies.
Mars Climate Orbiter, scheduled for launch Dec. 10, and Mars Polar Lander,
scheduled for launch Jan. 3, will seek clues to the history of climate
change on Mars.
The lander carries a pair of basketball-sized microprobes that will
be released as the lander approaches Mars and dive toward the planet's
surface, penetrating up to about 1 meter (3 feet) underground to test
10 new technologies, including a science instrument to search for traces
of water ice. The microprobe project, called Deep Space 2, is part of
NASA's New Millennium Program.
The 1998 missions will advance our understanding of Mars's climate history
and the planet's current water resources by digging into the enigmatic
layered terrain near one of its poles for the first time. Instruments
onboard the orbiter and lander will analyze surface materials, frost,
weather patterns, and interactions between the surface and atmosphere
to better understand how the climate of Mars has changed over time.
Key scientific objectives are to determine how water and dust move about
the planet and where water, in particular, resides on Mars today.
Today the Martian atmosphere is so thin and cold that it does not rain;
liquid water quickly freezes into ice or evaporates and resides in the
atmosphere. The temporary polar frosts which advance and retreat with
the seasons are made mostly of condensed carbon dioxide, the major constituent
of the Martian atmosphere. But the planet also hosts both water-ice clouds
and dust storms, the latter ranging in scale from local to global.
In September 1999, Mars Climate Orbiter will fire its main engine to
put itself into an elliptical orbit around Mars. The spacecraft will then
aerobrake through Mars's upper atmosphere for several weeks to reduce
velocity and circularize its orbit. Friction against the spacecraft's
single solar array will slow the spacecraft as it dips into the atmosphere
each orbit.
Finally, the spacecraft will use its thrusters to settle into a polar,
nearly circular orbit averaging 421 kilometers (262 miles) above the surface.
From there, the orbiter will serve as a radio relay satellite during the
lander's surface mission. After the lander's mission is over, the orbiter
will begin routine monitoring of the atmosphere, surface, and polar caps
for a complete Martian year (687 Earth days).
The orbiter carries two science instruments: the Pressure Modulator
Infrared Radiometer, and the Mars Color Imager, a new, light-weight imager
combining wide-and medium-angle cameras. The radiometer will measure temperatures,
dust, water vapor, and clouds by using a mirror to scan the atmosphere
from the Martian surface up to 80 kilometers (50 miles) above the planet's
limb.
Meanwhile, the imager will gather horizon-to-horizon images at up to
kilometer-scale (half-mile-scale) resolutions, which will then be combined
to produce daily global weather images. The camera will also image surface
features and produce a map with 40-meter (130-foot) resolution in several
colors, to provide unprecedented views of Mars's surface.
Mars Polar Lander will arrive in December 1999, two to three weeks after
the orbiter has finished aerobraking. The lander is aimed toward a target
sector within the edge of the layered terrain near Mars's south pole.
Mars Polar Lander will dive directly into the Martian atmosphere, using
an aeroshell and parachute to slow its initial descent. The lander will
rely on onboard guidance and retro-rockets to land softly on the layered
terrain near the south polar cap a few weeks after the seasonal carbon
dioxide frosts have disappeared.
About 10 minutes before touchdown, the lander will release the two Deep
Space 2 microprobes. Once released, the projectiles will collect atmospheric
data before they crash at about 200 meters per second (400 miles per hour)
and bury themselves beneath the Martian surface. The microprobes will
test the ability of very small spacecraft to deploy future instruments
for soil sampling, meteorology, and seismic monitoring. A key instrument
will look for signs of vaporized water ice.
Mars Polar Lander will dig into the top of the terrain using a robotic
arm. A camera mounted on the robotic arm will view the texture of the
surface material and look for fine-scale layering. The robotic arm will
also deliver soil samples to an instrument that will detect water and
carbon dioxide. An onboard weather station will take daily readings of
wind temperature and pressure, and seek traces of water vapor. A stereo
imager perched atop a mast will photograph the landscape surrounding the
spacecraft.
The lander is expected to operate on the surface for 60 to 90 Martian
days through the planet's southern summer.
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Space Activities at Whitney High School
By Phil Turek
The school year is off to a good start. Students at Whitney High School
are becoming increasingly involved in aerospace. In September, two dozen
Whitney students took a field trip to Griffith Observatory where they
hunted for the Mir space station and an Iridium flare, and they talked
with members of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society.
In October, another two dozen attended a JPL public lecture on the Stardust
space mission to be launched in February. Four dozen students attended
the opening of the new 3D IMAX movie "T-REX" at the Irvine Spectrum. Nearly
70 students attended a stargazing evening held at Whitney HS.
On Nov 6, a psychologist visited the high school, presenting her paper
on Group Behavior on Long Duration Space Missions. Her talk was a hit
with the school's astronomy club and WEST (Whitney Explorations of Science
and Technology) club. Nearly 30 Whitney students attended Boeing's Family
Night at the Downey facility that same evening, where after a group picture
was taken with Andy the Astronaut, the students were treated to a tour
of the inside of Boeing's full scale space shuttle orbiter mockup.
One student was able to attend a special presentation on SETI held by
The Planetary Society at Paramount Studios in Hollywood on Nov 16.
A popular activity at Whitney each year is the annual SpaceSet competition.
This competition challenges teams of students to describe an O'Neill space
colony and their plans for building it. It's exciting to participate in
SpaceSet. Already two dozen students are interested in spending the weekend
of December 5 designing an Earth orbiting space colony. If you'd like
to peek in on the students as they tackle the project then contact Phil
Turek at 914/842-9878. By the way, we'd love to have your support. If
you have any books related to space colonization that you'd be willing
to give to us, we'd greatly appreciate it. If you have a field of expertise
related to aerospace and you'd be willing to serve as a guest speaker
or evaluator, please contact Phil Turek. You'll find that it's a lot of
fun to work with these kids. Your influence on them can last a lifetime.
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