Some spaceflight stuff

The weekend has seen quite a bit of activity. The final activity for Robonaut 2 before being packed away for transport to the International Space Station can be seen in this video:

Meanwhile some humans who also hope to be stationed up there or thereabouts someday have also been undergoing some activity – underwater activity familiarising themselves with performing Extra Vehicular Activities, or spacewalks. The ESA Astronaut Candidates performed their EVA training in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at the European Astronaut Centre, in Cologne, Germany. Pictures here.

Other future space missions were in the spotlight as well. Russia and India are collaborating on a triple mission to the Moon, set for a 2013 launch. The mission will see an Indian rocket launch an Indian orbitting spacecraft, a Russian Lunar lander and an Indian lunar rover. The landing parts haven’t yet had a site chosen, but opinion favours the South pole, which is at a higher latitude than any previous mission, would allow more continuous communications and may improve chances of digging down and touching Lunar ice. Meanwhile, another Lunar mission by China has also been targetted at 2013, setting up an Eastern space race to be the first hardware on the surface of the Moon since 1976.

Of course, it might be nice if China did a bit of cleaning up closer to home as the nation has been revealed as the source of forty percent of the 10,000 or so bits of space debris in orbit of the Earth. The USA is second on 27.5 percent and Russia, whose space agency commissioned the report, third on 25.5 percent. The reason why China has so many bits floating about up there compared to the two powers who went up earlier and sent far more rockets in their time was the decision by the Chinese military to show off an anti satellite device that turned one defunct satellite into 2,800 pieces, which alone is more than the number of things left by second placed America.

NASA, meanwhile, is contemplating a mission to somewhere not very well covered – the surface of Venus. With suggestions that Venus may once have had continents, may well have been volcanically active more recently than previously assumed and with the low level of data we have on what it really looks like beneath the thick, swirling clouds, a mission called SAGE has been proposed. Landers on the surface of Venus last only a short while before succumbing to the intense pressure and temperatures, so SAGE intends to pack in as much as possible in the few hours it would have after landing on the flank of a possibly active volcano, Mielikki Mons. It would try to drill, to sample the air, to take spectral measurements of the composition of the ground, the subsurface, the gases and to send back as many images as possible before the second largest terrestrial planet swiftly destroys the newcomer as it has done all previous missions beneath the clouds – the present record for transmission from the surface was the 127 minutes of data from Venera 13 in 1982. If successful, SAGE’s 2016 launch would see it on the way to becoming the first landing on Venus since 1985.

NASA aren’t the only USA launchers in town. An Air Force Satellite was launched by the United Launch Alliance on an Atlas V rocket. Picture here.

And finally, Cassini has been revisiting the Tiger Stripes on Enceladus, the tiny, icy satellite of Saturn. The tiger stripes are now known to be areas from which vast amounts of water are shooting from inside the satellite and Cassini has taken images in the infrared to detect heat structures within the stripes and understand the mechanisms behind the ejection of the water. Previous flybys were inappropriate for the infrared instruments to be used as the surface flew by too quickly on previous low orbits.

Report on the Kendal Solar System Scale Model

A quick admission to make, due to the weather rather spoiling my plans, I never did a walkabout of the solar system scale model held in Kendal on Waterside. I did see bits of it getting set up, all the way up to Uranus – where I was stationed. I had decided I would go walkabout at around three o’clock, but part of my duties involved showing people the Sun through a Coronado Personal Solar Telescope, kindly donated for the day by Robin Leadbeater, and as luck would have it from about half two until half four (thirty minutes after the official end of the event) I was deluged with people either wanting to watch the Sun, or standing at the ready for when the next break in the clouds came.

Instead, my time was spent by the bridge over the Kent, next to the Abbot Hall playground alongside UnmannedSpaceflight.com volunteer Neil Wheeler and a sign indicating Uranus. As Neil took charge of delivering quick bursts of information on the planet formerly known as Neptune George III Great Britain (snappy, why did they ever rename it?) amongst other things, I stood forlornly by a telescope pointed at the clouds.

Then there was a small break – just enough for me to point the telescope towards a bright light not often seen. Then another crack in the clouds, just enough to tune the telescope to show the bright regions, granulation, prominences and a filament. Another crack and the focusing was adjusted.

One o’clock seemed to spark off the first real wave of people coming through, following the sporadics in the first hour. After this point, more and more people flowed steadily through, many stopping to try and catch the Sun in one of the rare breaks in the cloud. Eventually, larger areas of blue sky started to filter through and rather than taking a quick walk to Pluto, people elected to wait until one arrived, providing a good dozen or so people queuing at a time. Old hands, mothers with babes in sling (at least two of those), young children (for which the telescope was lowered) and everyone in between. Even a member of the Cumbrian Skies group of the Stargazer’s Lounge found time to drop by.

Several people had their fears about looking directly through a telescope at the Sun calmed with a quick chat about how the Coronado rejected 99.9% of the light coming into it and selected only a tiny fraction to see. As a result, they got their first views of the solar surface magnified by around 40x and for those who were able to focus on the detail (for some, it took some time, for others it was instant), the views were memorable. One young boy called the Sun ‘creepy’ when he saw the feathered edges and sinuous detail like the filament (called variously, ‘the tadpole’ and ‘the wiggly thing’) and the brighter glowing regions. The Sun is coming out of the deepest solar minimum for a century, making the views even more special. The reasons behind that apparently lie in a conveyor belt of plasma that has been spinning round faster than normal in recent years, but not stretching as far down in previous cycles as it does now. But the activity (measurable through new techniques such as using the polarisation of light to detect the magnetic field structure), and the resulting auroral signals, provided some talking points for visitors.

But dragging myself away from the solar viewing (by the shorn tips of my fingers), going both on the account of the happy faces arriving at Uranus and the official event write-up by organiser Stuart Atkinson, the day went well with people by the dozen flowing through and seeing just how big things in our tiny corner of the galaxy are and getting in most cases their first filtered look at the thing that holds the entire solar system together. The Sun.

Brian Cox as he isn’t usually seen

With his present high public profile, Professor Brian Cox (who tweets here) is probably more familiar in areas like this, explaining how Titan’s lakes were detected by Cassini in the Wonders of the Solar System program. However, as his title implies, he does actually work in academia, on projects relating to the Large Hadron Collider. His latest scientific paper is available for all to see (dealing with how the way in which the theoretical Higg’s boson – which provides mass if it exists – can have the strength of coupling to other particles measured by how they decay into other particles when exposed during a high energy collision in a particle accelerator), though it is perhaps not quite as accessible as the TV programs.

Of course, a little reediting of the Wonders of the Solar System has led to other ways to see another face of Brian Cox – like this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/solarsystem/moons/titan_(moon)#p0070hyp