Launchpad Space News, October 1999

Oct ober1999

Pioneer 10, a spacecraft launched in 1972, is still going strong and has made an astounding discovery by just being out there. Researchers noticed that the aged spacecraft, having traveled 11 million Km over the last 25 years, was being deflected from its path just a tiny little bit. In the emptiness of space just shouldn't happen, and originally it was suspected that we had misunderstood the laws of gravity, but now it looks like there's quite a large object hiding out there amongst the far away comets.

Dr John Murray of the UK's Open University has been studying how comets' orbits are affected, and thinks the new object is somewhere off in the direction of Delphinus (The Dolphin), about a light-year away; a quarter of the distance to our nearest star. It is very dark, and very, very big. Bigger than Jupiter, which is the biggest planet we can see right now. With luck, the next generation of large telescopes will be able to spot the planet by the heat that it gives out but but even the biggest and best aren't good enough. Mind you, by fitting some new-fangled adaptive optics to the old Mount Palomar "200 inch" telescope - once the largest in the world - astronomers have managed to spot clouds on the surface of Neptune. Our own atmosphere mangles the light as it passes through, but by using a cunning system of mirrors that readjust themselves 500 times a second an image close to the theoretical best can be obtained.

Pioneer 10 is in no danger of a collision with the new planet though, and passed Neptune (eighth rock out from the sun) should end up amongst the stars that make up the constellation Taurus in about 2 million years. I'll do a write-up for The Roundabout.

Laingholm Gets A Launch

It's official: The TrailBlazer lunar probe is on. This is the spacecraft that I have been working on and is going to be the one that puts Laingholm on the launchpad amongst a blaze of publicity - I hope! TransOrbital has offices in Virginia, California, Maryland, Indiana, Mississippi, Canada, Ireland and The Netherlands, as well as New Zealand, but I'll try to get our share of the glory.

TrailBlazer (on the left) has cameras to take a video of Earthrise as well as a telescope that will be pointed at the Moon to get pictures which should be good enough for us to spot the tyre tracks from the astronaut's moonbuggies - and who knows, even the moonbuggies themselves.

Most of the pictures will be taken from 100Km up or so, but after a month or three we'll get daring and bring it right down to ground level, cameras rolling, until we hit the surface. We now have enough sponsorship to get the project moving and are aiming for a launch in December 2000. Not quite what Arthur C. Clarke had in mind as he thought about 2001, but it's only the start.

Mars Miss A Conversion

October's "Boo-Boo Of The Month Award" goes to NASA, for the confirmation that the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft burned itself up because of the American fascination with inches, feet and pounds and not because of Mysteron anti-spacecraft fire as I had previously suggested. Unlike the rest of the world's scientists who have standardised on metres, kilos and so forth, many US scientists still use archaic colonial measurements which they refer to as "English" units (even though the Poms long since abandoned them). If you're a rocket scientist and you assume everyone is operating in American units and they aren't you barbecue one spacecraft on re-entry.

Ozzies Get A Rocket

Kistler Aerospace broke ground for a launchpad earlier this year for their new K1 rocket and hoped to launch before Christmas. However, they're picking up the occasional delay and don't look like launching until next year at the earliest. Meanwhiles, SpaceLift Australia has announced that it plans to launch old Russian SS-25 rockets from the Woomera launch range (see right) - without their old nuclear warheads, of course. The first of three test flights should go up in December this year, paving the way for a commercial launch in February 2001. The old converted ICBMs can carry a payloads of up to 800 kg into a Low Earth Orbit, and have so far had 6 duds out of 400 launches.

The Undead Moon

In keeping with the spooky times, a team of astronomers led by Bonnie Buratti at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory now believe that the Earth's Moon is an Undead world. No, vampyres and zombies do not roam free (not that we know about, anyway) but the Moon itself is still moving and changing. Quite a surprise to many people, as geologists have always believed that all its volcanoes cooled off long ago. For hundreds of years, some astronomers have reported flashes of light and erie glows hovering above the surface of some valleys and craters. Perhaps pockets of gas escaping from long-dead volcanic caves, meteorite strikes, or amateur astronomers overdoing the dose.
But now the Clementine spacecraft has had the good fortune to photograph the same area of the moon - near an area called the Aristarchus Plateau - that changed. With no atmosphere to give a weather, and no volcanic activity to provide lava flows or earthquakes, this needs a damn good explanation. Astronomers reported glows over a feature called the Cobrahead on the 23^rd April, and Clementine had already photographed it on the 3^rd March. A new photograph on 27^th April did indeed show a change, but what exactly happened is still a mystery.

Moon Trees

Back in 1971, an intrepid ex-firefighter called Stuart Roosa set off in Apollo 14, headed for the Moon. Packed in his personal possessions were between 400-500 tree seeds, carefully packaged and wrapped. Stuart never got to stand on the moon; he was their anchor man. He stayed with the command module "Kitty Hawk" to make sure that it stayed in a proper orbit while his buddies got the glory.

Unfortunately, the seed canisters burst open during the decontamination procedures after their return to Earth, and the seeds were presumed to be gonners. But with some TLC from the Californian Forest Service, between 420 and 450 trees survived the journey to sprout and grow. After more than 20 years have passed, they are growing strong and seem totally unfazed by their trip. At the right is a picture of a large sycamore Moon Tree at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Other trees were sent to Brazil, Switzerland and even to the Emperor of Japan.

Sadly, Stuart Roosa passed away in December 1994 but his legacy of The Moon Trees continues to flourish. No list was ever kept of where they went, so if you know of one, please send a message to dwilliam@nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov or drop me a line and I'll pass it on.

As Sure As Eggs

Ozzie astronomers are planning the world's largest and weirdest radio telescope for the new millennium and it could be built in Western Australia, although anything built on Earth has the usual limitations of radio interference and not being able to see the whole sky.

Resembling a few trays of eggs more than anything else and weighing in at close to A$100 million, the telescope uses an unusual design called a "Luneburg Lens", each one 5m across. It is just one possible design though; China suggests a series of 300m dishes embedded in the ground like the great Arecibo radio telescope. India and America suggest thousands of little dishes like the ones used to pick up Sky digital TV, and we'll just have to wait and see who wins. NZ isn't in the running, of course.

This is all a far cry from the early days of radio astronomy when dishes were built from wooden poles and chickenwire, but by understanding more about how the bits of the universe interact we can actually understand more about the way matter works on a small scale. Helium, for instance, was first discovered on the Sun, not on Earth. Who knows what a few gross of giant eggs will discover?

This edition is also on the web, just point your web browser to http://family.gen.nz/launchpad. vik@family.gen.nz

"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
- Will Rogers, American Humorist, 1879-1935