July 2005

While the world is watching the space shuttle, which we'll get to later, some truly significant discoveries are being made elsewhere in the solar system. The most recent is the discovery of a huge lake of ice on the North Pole of Mars, tucked away in a crater. They know it must be ice, because it's too warm for anything else. Low gravity skating anyone?

The image on the right, courtesy of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, clearly shows a 200 metre high patch of ice inside a crater 35 kilometres wide and about 2 kilometres deep. It's probably propped up on something, but by my estimation it is at least 10 kilometres across. Knowing what we do about the ability of organisms to live in and under ice, it's a fair bet that if life did evolve on Mars at any point, we may find its remnants in similar locations to this ice field.

For those equipped with the Internet, there is even a 3D view of the ice and crater at http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMGKA808BE_0.html that you can view with those red/blue stereo goggles from kiddies books.

So on to the Space Shuttle Discovery, which finally made it into space despite a faulty fuel gauge. They had 4 gauges, and the original flight specifications said that 3 out of 4 was good enough. The new rules said all 4 were required, but NASA ignored them and launched anyway after testing everything out thoroughly. Naughty, naughty.

But as we now know, their attempts to stop the insulation falling off the big, orange fuel tank were not successful. "We were actually quite surprised to hear we had some large pieces of debris fall off the external tank, it wasn't what we had expected," Commander Collins told media in an interview from the shuttle. "Frankly we were disappointed to hear that had happened. We thought we had this problem fixed."

The shuttles are now soooo grounded until the naughty boys and girls at NASA figure out how to fix the problem properly. The good news is that a scan made in orbit with cunning technology held on the end of the shuttle's arm shows Discovery doesn't appear to have been significantly damaged by the metre-long chunk, and should be able to land on schedule. The only casualty, as shown in this NASA shot on the right, was an unfortunate bird that got whumped before Discovery had even cleared the tower. The whumping wasn't fatal to the bird, but the BBQ effect of 3 shuttle main engines and two solid rocket boosters probably cooked its goose.

The Cassini mission around Saturn continues to dish up surprises. This time a freaky sound track that wouldn't sound out of place on Doctor Who, but that came from listening to the disturbances in Saturn's magnetic fields. Due to limitations in the printed edition, you'll have to go here to listen to it: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html

Space tourism got another boost this month, as Roskosmos announced a ticket price of US$100 million for a trip around the moon. The tourist and astronaut guide, with freshly-lightened pockets, would lift off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan on a Soyuz rocket, spend a week on the International Space Station (ISS) and then leave the ISS to travel around the moon at a height of 160km before returning to Earth. Soyuz was designed for the job, and a launch could happen within 18 months.

The RepRap machine (http://reprap.org) that we're constructing is now building tubes with cross-section shapes other than plain circles. We're a long way from being able to print spare parts for space stations, but we've started work on some precision controls for it using the precision stepper motors out of old floppy disk drives. We've also, erm, slightly overheated (read: vapourised) 3 glue guns in our experiments, and the $2 Shop has run out of them. Time to do dangerous things with toaster elements...

This edition is also on the web, just point your web
browser to http://olliver.family.gen.nz.   vik@olliver.family.gen.nz
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Back to the Launchpad main page http://olliver.family.gen.nz/launchpad