Sven's Space Thoughts

Cultural blindness?

2005-10-17T19:55:00.000+02:00

How many of us space enthusiasts have really noticed the arrival of the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa at the asteroid Itokawa? The mission that the Japanese are attempting is really something great. But this mission (it has some technical trouble that should be possible to overcome) has passed almost unnoticed by major media and even space news outlets. Why is that? Because only what NASA does matters? Or, because the Japanese do not posssess the effective PR machine that NASA has? What do you think?

PowerPoint is Evil?

2005-09-12T06:23:00.000+02:00

Following the Columbia disaster much criticism has been directed at the use of PowerPoint to present technical data. An American professor, Edward Tufte, has published a book with the title "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" in which he tears this software tool apart as being superficial, presenter-friendly but listener/viewer-unfriendly and having a very low infomration density. He also blasts PowerPoint as being only useful for the "sales pitch" and for transmitting a "commercial attitude to everything". Tufte originally published his views in Wired under the title "PowerPoint is evil".

Maybe you have heard the little story being banded around the Internet?: The Devil is interviewing applicants for the job of being his assistant and says: "I am looking for someone well versed in the art of torturee - do you know PowerPoint"?

Foton-M2 lands tomorrow, 16 June

2005-06-15T11:00:00.000+02:00

Approximate landing coordinates are 52 deg 00 min north, 64 deg 13 min east. The parachute will open at 0729 UT. Ther Russian recovery forces consist of three planes, seven helicopters and three rescue vehicles. Last radio contact with Esrange is planned for today, 15 June, at 1640 UT.

Are there new ways of developing space systems?

2005-06-09T04:29:00.000+02:00

Ever so often a space entrepeneur comes onto the media stage and announces that there is an entirely new way of building hardware for space - and NASA (especially) does not recognize this revolutionary new way of doing things. The space industry is an established industry and yet these ideas come up regularly. Why? In the airplane and car industry this syndrome does not exist.

I think the reaon is that we all (space enthusiasts) feel frustrated with the high costs of space transporation which sets the costs standards for spacecraft building. These high costs limit our dreams of boundless space flight. In real life space flight does not look like what we see in SF movies.

Also, space flight is largely managed by bureaucracies, private and public, and we have been taught (true or false) that they are, by definition, inept.

However, there is a quiet revolution going on that affects all branches of technology. It is about methods for designing electronics and software. Software is no longer an art, but an industrial activity with standardized, replaceable parts. Automatic code generation is bridging the gap between the functional specification and the actual code in one step. What used to be very complicated and difficult - like designing a three-axes stabilized spacecraft - is now not such a big deal. Fantastically powerful and cheap star trackers are another key to why it is relatively simple to design sophisticated attitude control systems. Simulation methods in software is making it possible to "fly" space missions on the ground with amazing fidelity.

All this happened in the last ten years. For example, in 1995 the attitude control software for Sweden's Odin satellite was hand-coded. Just five years later the same type of software for ESA's moon probe SMART-1 (developed in Sweden) was created by automatic code generation.

What is behind all this? The general advance of technology? Yes, but spearheaded by the mobile telephone industry - an industry in which software is king - reliable software that can be developed quickly to meet ever increasing demnds for shortening the "time-to-market".

What is next? Perhaps silicon-based microsystems? In any case, many places in the solar system are revisited by automated space probes orders of magnitude more powerful than the first probes going there. So, space flight that was regarded as a generator of new technology on a broad front now is the receiver of technology from other industry sectors. Is this a threat or blessing? Any thoughts?

A good old frequency

2005-06-03T04:10:00.000+02:00

The current Russian Foton-M2 microgravity research spacecraft carrying, i.a., ESA experiments transmits on the traditional frequency used by these satellites, i.e. 239.5 MHz. The signal is a wide-band, high modulation index FM signal with strong signal peaks about 130 kHz on either side of the center frequency. It sounds like sharp buzz. Maik Hermenau in Germany was the first to spot the signals from Foton-M2.

So, this telemetry system was not changed despite the many other design modifications that took place between the basic Foton and the Foton-M. You may remember that the Foton-M1 never made it to orbit. The rocket exploded 20 seconds after launch from Plesetsk on October 15, 2002.

Probably, the signals can be heard daily by listeners in central and northern Europe until the flight ends on June 16. Do not expect signals on every revolution. Orbital elements can be found at Space-Track.org by using the spacecraft's object number 28686.

ESA experiments on board are being controlled from Esrange in northern Sweden using a telemetry and telecommand system built by the Swedish Space Corporation. It operates on the traditional downlink frequency used by all national Swedish science satellites - 2208.1629 MHz.

Mars Express sees ice on Mars - little attention in the U.S.

2005-02-23T09:51:00.000+01:00

I may be hyper-sensitive, but the images from Europe´s Mars Express showing what scientists think is pack ice at the surface of Mars are just as convincing as anything that NASA's rovers provide! But the Mars Express pictures have been largely neglected in U.S. space news media on the web (and also by CNN.com). Space.com carries the news, but not Spaceflightnow.com (now they do after a day or two of delay). And - to lend credibility to the story - a U.S. scientist is quoted.

Poor ESA! It will always be the "little brother" in the "space family". "NASA" is a magic word that the acronym "ESA" will never be able to equal. I see the same phenomenon locally in Sweden. The media never think that what we do inside the country counts - only foreigners are credible. So, the trick is to ask someone from outside the country to praise what we do in space science in Sweden. Then the media listen.

And of course - a comment from someone even remotely related to NASA is the ultimate stamp of approval. So, American friends, you may complain about the waning status of NASA - on this side of the Atlantic its image as the ultimate bearer of the secrets of the Universe is as strong as ever!

People with BIG dreams

2005-02-07T07:15:00.000+01:00

I went to the movies this weekend and saw "The Aviator", the story of Howard Hughes starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. Of course the movie casts Mr Hughes in a very favourable light, but I cannot avoid thinking the thought that I basically like the guy! He was dreaming BIG dreams and having the means and guts to try to make them come true. And he dreamed about great things like advancing aviation for the good of the masses. He reminds me of another person with huge dreams: Sergei Korolev, the creator of Sputnik and builder of the world's first piloted spaceship. Such people do exist even today, but they seem to be less common!

Go see the movie! It reveals thing I had no idea about - like the fact that Katherine Hepburn was HH's girlfriend for quite a while! An odd couple.

Raw Huygens image files now on ESA's site

2005-01-18T07:16:00.000+01:00

To my satisfaction ESA has added the camera team's complete inventory of pictures on their site. So, we can now all play with them. But are these compressed versions? Are the real pictures better? I sure hope so.

"Amateurs" process Huygens pix

2005-01-17T06:01:00.001+01:00

Less than 15 hours after the landing on Titan (at least that is when I found out about it) , "amateurs" published really neat processed pictures from Huygens, far surpassing anything official sources had put out. If the science teams put out the raw pix for people to play with on purpose it was a brilliant PR move. It also proves the power of the Internet.

If it was done on purpose, do others dare to follow the same track? If not done on purpose, will the science community dare to do it again - this time on purpose?

See the pix at :

http://anthony.liekens.net/index.php/Main/Huygens

The F-15 ASAT story - a tale from the 80's

2005-01-16T16:20:00.000+01:00

I have added an article "The F-15 ASAT story" to my web site.

* Go to my web site http://www.svengrahn.pp.se
* Click on "What's new?"
* Select entry for 16 January 2005

Many thanks to Gregory Karambelas!

ESA and public relations - not a happy couple.

2005-01-15T14:07:00.000+01:00

When Huygens data were about to come into ESOC at Darmstadt the only real-time link for the general public was a webcast from the control room via NASA-TV(!). ESA-TV only goes out via satellite and sometimes via a channel called EuroNews (which very few households have).

There was no comment or explanation as to what was happening in the control room. The gentleman who had been interviewing people earlier in the day was sitting at a console chit-chatting with a female colleague leaning over his shoulder. The minutes dragged by, and if you really made an effort you could hear him say "not yet, not yet". Time passed 1615 UT but only by whipping around several ESA web pages I knew that signals were expected at about 1621 UT. Finally, at about 1620 everybody cheered and it seemed that data was coming in.

The gentleman I mentioned above then left his console and there was general pandemonium. However, the sound was still on and I could hear other console operators saying things to each other. I almost immediately heard the words "there is something wrong". Maybe 30 seconds later one could make out something about "channel A not working but data coming in on channel B". After that the view switched to a conference room where a lot of people were waiting for the big managers to appear and make pompous statements.

They did come, after a while, and made quite predictable statements. ESA's DG Dordain is a good speaker and sometimes fun to listen to. The science director David Southwood is a great communicator, when he speaks freely. We sometimes call him "Europe's only stand-up scientist". But when making prepared statements, he and Dordain are as dull as every other big-wig.

So, ESA made three mistakes:

* Not using the most up-to-date channel to reach media and the public, i.e. its own web broadcast system.
* Letting the public watch a real-time event unfold without a knowledgeable guide. The uncommented broadcast from the control room was a disaster.
* Instead of giving concrete details about what just had happened room was given to pompous gala speeches by top managers instead of some technically knowledgable giving information as to what had just occurred.

Every big ESA announcement of big news follows this same pattern. Instead of getting the public excited about space it makes people bored and confused.

I was in a news studio of Radio Sweden trying to help listeners understand what was going on. I used the NASA-TV webcast and Spaceflightnow to try to follow events. I barely managed to give listeners their money's worth.

This approach of ESA's must change in order to keep the support of the public. The drama and excitement of space events are grossly underutilized.

Food is on it's way

2004-12-24T04:15:00.000+01:00

I picked up signals from the new Russian spacecraft with supplies for the International Space Station, Progress M-51, on 24 December 2003:

At 0252.25-0258.00 UT on 166.0 MHz
At 0252.30-0247.20 on 922.76 MHz

I have been picking up signals from Progress space ships since early 1978 - it is an amazing 27 years ago. These space station supply craft have been extremely reliable, actually it was with the then current space station, Salyut-6, that the Russians finally got their spacecraft really reliable.

So, it seems the flight is off to a good start and if this continues the ISS crew will have enough food to continue the mission on the ISS.

William of Ockham, where are you now that we really need you?

2004-12-19T16:09:00.000+01:00

I must recount a really bizarre event. A high school student called me at work (the Swedish Space Corporation) and wanted to interview me about the technology used in Apollo. When he appeared at my office it turns out that it is the sorry old story about shadows in the pictures that Armstrong and Aldrin took and all the other purported oddities that are supposed to prove the Moon landing was a fake. The young man explained that he had been sent by his teacher as part of a school project in "critical thinking". I couldn't help myself but told him that if he had practised a little critical thinking he would not have come at all - he would have found that the story of Apollo being a fake is a fake itself. For example, I said, how could hundreds of thousands of NASA employees have been convinced to shut up about this "truth" for 34 years?

To make him understand I mentioned ”Ockhams razor”, an idea attributed to the monk William of Ockham in the 14 century that the simpler explanation is to be preferred over the more complicated - all unneccesary assumptions need to be "shaved off"! But I only saw a blank stare. Finally I gave up and directed him to web sites (www.badastronomy.com) where the so-called proofs are analyzed and the arguments make the story of the Apollo fake disappear like trolls at sunrise!

But what kind of teacher teaches pupils to arrange interviews under false pretenses and not try to discuss the basics of the Apollo fake myth before sending the students on a "fool's errand"? Clearly, this student, like most kids, was an ardent believer in the Apollo fake myth.

Sorry for blowing my top, but I watched Apollo-17 launch from Cape Canaveral and participated in amateur radio tracking of its way to the moon! See http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/Apollo17/APOLLO17.htm

Early Space History, it is slipping away

2004-12-19T14:36:00.000+01:00

I have just posted an article about the flight of Luna-3 at my web site(http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/luna3/Luna3story.html). This Soviet spacecraft was the first to image the moon's far side. In trying to write a detailed story about this space mission I find that the 15 years of glasnost and post-glasnost has produced only a minimum of details about this pioneering space feat. The principal actors in 1959 are mostly gone by now and they have left little written testimony behind. It seems that the 1990's was the last chance to really document what went on in the early space age. I fear that some archives also are deteriorating. So, to write the history of the early space age, we have to hurry, hurry,..