In the last post I said, 'And the hands are raised and you hear the shouts, "Fund me, fund me!"'
Kendall noted that I was getting good at being cynical about the space program in general, and funding in particular.
I mentioned that I should sit with the audience and see what it is I am saying behind the foot lights.
Maybe I wave my arms too much and come across with an attitude that says,.
"SEE ME, SEE ME, HEAR WHAT I HAVE TO SAY AND BE AMAZED!" :-)
Sorry about that. Looking at how missions do finally get implemented is worth noting but takes more research to uncover.
(All those negative sound bites are so easy to copy.)
Does one report it took a long time to get the mission approved or that dedication and persistence, with the ability to adapt to changing requirements, triumphs?.
Many years were spent getting NASA to okay the Kepler mission but Bill Borucki wouldn't give up.
- LRK -
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The idea of using transits to detect extrasolar planets was first published in 1971 by computer scientist Frank Rosenblatt. Kepler’s principal investigator, William Borucki, expanded on that idea in 1984 with Audrey Summers, proposing that transits could be detected using high-precision photometry. The next sixteen years were spent proving to others—and to NASA—that this idea could work.
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After revising, testing, publishing, and proposing for nearly twenty years, Kepler was finally approved as a Discovery mission in 2001
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Had Bill not kept up the good fight I wouldn't have gotten to write a bit of LabView code to control some of the components on the tester that was built to show you could extract information about the slight dimming that would be caused by a transiting planet.
- LRK -
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“To prove we could reliably detect a brightness change of 84 ppm, we needed a method to reduce the light by that amount. If a piece of glass is slid over a hole, the glass will reduce the flux by 8 percent—about one thousand times too much,” Borucki explained. “Adding antireflection coatings helped by a factor of sixteen, but the reduction was still sixty times too large. How do you make the light change by 0.01 percent?
“There really wasn’t anything that could do the job for us, so we had to invent something,” said Borucki. “Dave Koch realized that if you put a fine wire across an aperture—one of the drilled holes—it would block a small amount of light. When a tiny current is run through the wire, it expands and blocks slightly more light. Very clever. But it didn’t work.”
“There really wasn’t anything that could do the job for us, so we had to invent something,” said Borucki. “Dave Koch realized that if you put a fine wire across an aperture—one of the drilled holes—it would block a small amount of light. When a tiny current is run through the wire, it expands and blocks slightly more light. Very clever. But it didn’t work.”
“So Dave had square holes drilled,” said Borucki. “With a square hole, when the wire moves off center, it doesn’t change the amount of light. To keep the wire from bending, we flattened it.” The results demonstrated that transits could be detected at the precision needed even in the presence of on-orbit noise.
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The Mars rovers might not have ever made it to Mars if Steve Squyres hadn't persisted and found ways to overcome the obstacles.
- LRK -
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Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet
By Steve Squyres
Scribe
422 pages
ISBN 1401301495
1401301495
AUD$49.95
The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington is one of the great museums of the world. It is awe-inspiring to see artefacts from the 1903 Wright Flyer to the original Apollo 11 command module. They demonstrate a tradition of brilliant, painstaking design and engineering in the face of environments hostile to man and machine.
Steve Squyres, the scientific principal investigator of the team that proposed, designed and built the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, is proud to be part of that tradition. But there were plenty of problems along the way. Before the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project, Squyres had painful years of rejected proposals, starting with one in 1993 for a camera to go on the Mars Environmental Survey Pathfinder. When the MER team finally did receive approval from NASA to construct the rovers, the time frame was almost impossibly brief, with immense technical problems to surmount.
Then, in 2003, when a lastminute problem emerged just before the start of the launch window, it looked as though the launch of Spirit and Opportunity might be delayed until the next good window in 2005, or even permanently. And while Squyres was arguing for the launch to go ahead, an important NASA official told him, depressingly, “I think they’d look pretty damn good over in the Air and Space Museum.” That particular problem – as with all those that had preceded it – was finally solved by the hardworking team, but more just kept on coming.
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I would imagine that most missions have their own set of problems and that solving them is what engineers like to do.
And if you read Alan Binder's book you will note other kinds of problems, not so easily fixed by engineers..
- LRK -
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Lunar Prospector: Against All Odds [Paperback]Alan B. Binder (Author)
Lunar Prospector, Against all Odds is the Principal Investigator’s highly personal account of the triumphs, defeats, dirty politics, and ultimate success enjoyed and endured during the 13 years it took to accomplish the Lunar Prospector mission. Like the mission, Lunar Prospector, Against all Odds answers to the American taxpayer, but this time spotlighting the incompetence and self-serving activities of the NASA bureaucracy and accompanying aerospace industries. Together, they waste a large portion of the $13 billion yearly federal government budget to execute America’s space program.
The Lunar Prospector mission was the only NASA funded space project that was conceived and managed by a scientist rather than a NASA bureaucrat or engineer — a venture initially developed outside NASA that proved when missions are properly conceived and managed, the cost of space exploration can be cut by a factor of 10.
Lunar Prospector, Against all Odds shines light on the faltering American space program, however, it also provides new hope and vision — one for transforming the tired space industry into an efficient, commercially based, and profit-driven program that eliminates the federal government handouts which so lucratively line the pockets of the huge aerospace industry.
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Having played a small part in helping NASA Ames Research Center provide Lunar Prospector data to be displayed on a web site and being a passive watcher of the daily goings on, I would beg to differ with some of Alan Binder's portrayal of the Lunar Prospector mission.
As I mentioned, maybe I should sit with you and see what it is I am saying behind those foot lights.
Please feel free to give me a nudge, nudge, and let me know what kind of arm waving you would like to see.
Thanks for looking up with me.
- LRK -
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- LRK -
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -
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