Sep 2001

Space has not exactly been the hot topic in the news of late, but believe it or not there has been a fair bit going on up there. The International Space Station (ISS) made the space headlines once more, as it acquired another bit from Russia. The Pir module (conveniently translating from Russian to "Pier") is another airlock module. Yes, I know they launched one that was supposed to eventually take both kinds of spacesuit last time; this one is for docking spacecraft with although you probably could pop out of it in a Russian spacesuit. The net happy result for the ISS crew is that they have some more living space.

The End Of Deep Space

Deep Space 1 is on its final mission. Originally designed as a demonstrator for a novel and relatively powerful ion engine, the spacecraft has had a chequered but successful career. Its engines jammed and cleared a couple of times, but it completed its primary mission; to flyby the asteroid Braille, which it did last September (shown here courtesy of NASA's artists on the left. Then the navigation sensors went up the spout. After some emergency late-night programming sessions at JPL, the black-and-white camera was reprogrammed to be a star sensor and the mission resumed.

Its last target was comet Borrelly, which it missed by only 2,200km - a mere gnat's whisker on the cosmic scale of things. They think they've got some b&w pictures and some good results from the sensors that pick up the ion trail left by the comet, but it'll take a few days to download and analyse it all. DS1 won't last forever though, in fact it'll run out of fuel in November having boldly gone where no probe has gone before.

Taurus, A Total Bulls Up

Orbital Science's 4-stage Taurus rocket (nice picture by Orbital Sciences on the right) was looking all fine as the first stage shot the thing skywards on the 21^st September. It was 85 seconds later when the second stage tried to take over that things sort of went sideways. Official reports use technical terms like "several gyrations", which isn't good. Although the rocket did recover and end up going in the right direction once more, it had lost too much speed to make it into orbit and dropped - expensive satellites and all - into the Indian Ocean.

Orbview 4 and QuikTOMS were the casualties. Orbview being an imaging satellite which someone would no doubt like to be pointing at remote parts of Afghanistan right now, and QuickTOMS being NASA's latest method of seeing how badly we're making holes in the ozone while a better satellite to do the job gets built.

Who's A SMART-1 Then?

The moon is once more on the list of places to send space probes to. The European Space Agency was to hold a meeting in Berlin last week to discuss the SMART-1 probe - ESA's first planned lunar mission shown in their nice ESA artist's picture on the left. Unfortunately air travel got slightly disrupted, and the meeting had to be put off.

SMART Stands for Small Missions in Advanced Research Technology, and like the Deep Space One mission it is to powered by an electric ion engine called a Hall Thruster. The craft will orbit the moon for 6 months, deploying a variety of sensors and cameras. One particularly neat device going by the name of a fluorescence spectroscopy micro-collimator (no, I don't know either) will apparently allow the minerals that make up the moon be identified from orbit. This is information we're still in need of, as the Apollo missions literally barely scratched the surface. Even with the SMART-1 data, we still won't know what's buried in the lunar soil, simply because nobody has gone there and dug a big enough hole. But it will give us some clues as to where we want to start digging.

Brewing Up A Stellar Beer

Alcohol, the cause of and solution to most of life's problems (apologies to Homer Simpson). NASA have twigged that many of us normal - and I use the term loosely, folks - persons do enjoy a drop of beer from time to time and have been doing so for thousands of years. Now, at NZ$50,000 a kilo it's a wee bit expensive to haul up slabs of Lion Red or a dozen bottles of Stella. So Coors got together with NASA and put a microbrewery in space.

Now when I say microbrewery, I mean really, really micro. They only brewed up 1cc of grog, although the quality is apparently very good. It's the distributed yeast, you see; it floats around in zero g, absorbing all the sugar and turning it into alcohol rather than just sitting on the bottom of the keg in a soggy lump. Kirsten Sterrett, recently a University of Colorado graduate, did what any self-respecting student would at the end of the experiment, and drank it.

A Billion Tonnes Of Trouble

On the 25^th September (NZ time) a rather large solar flare went off. The launch of an Athena-1 rocket was cancelled at NASA's Kodiak launch complex as the radiation was over safe limits for the launch vehicle (image on the right courtesy of SOHO consortium. SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA). The solar X-ray radiation had in fact increased to over 1,000 times normal levels. The radiation is essentially the flash of light from the explosion, which also sent a billion tonnes of Sun heading our way. This could make for some interesting Northern and Southern Lights over the next few days, but I doubt I'll see anything in Auckland. It's still good to watch the stars at night though, knowing more about what goes on up there.

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

"A society that will trade a little order for a little freedom will lose both, and deserve neither." -Thomas Jefferson
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