MICA rocket launch, part 7…LAUNCH

Hello faithful followers, so as the title implies, we did in fact launch the MICA rocket at 08:41 PM AKST Saturday, February 18 (or 12:41 AM EST Sunday, Feb 19) and the rocket performance and scientific measurements were a success.  About an hour before the window opened we had a hint of good things to come, as both the team at Poker Flat and us at Fort Yukon got to see aurora during the twilight. Yes, that’s right, we got to see the beautiful sight of the sun setting on the horizon with aurora above it, just beautiful. Once we saw a well-formed arc over Fort Yukon, it was go time. Here are links to time-lapse videos of what the aurora looked like that night (aurora 1 and aurora 2). The rocket launched and from Fort Yukon I could actually see the rocket motor burning out on the southern horizon as it hurtled upwards. The two-stage rocket reached an apogee (maximum height) of 325 km (202 miles) in roughly seven minutes. Unfortunately for me, the boom that the DERPA was sitting on did not deploy (the one we tested in a video in my previous post), but we were still able to get some data from at least one of the instruments; it seems like the part responsible for releasing the boom, called the spider, did not function correctly, but that was not my responsibility. Everything I built seems to have worked perfectly.

After the launch Saturday night, we at Fort Yukon began packing up and I returned to Fairbanks Sunday evening where the entire launch team had a very nice celebratory dinner. Monday we returned to Poker Flat Research Range to finish packing up our equipment and then early Tuesday morning I left for the home and made it back Tuesday night. Now I’m excited to get some sleep in my own bed and get ready to do some seriously data analysis.

Surprisingly, we’ve been getting crazy levels of press coverage of the launch! It’s been great, we’ve seen mention of our rocket from the Fairbanks local paper, CNN, MSNBC, Foster’s Daily Democrat (the NH Seacoast local newspaper), and spaceref.com among others. Here’s the official press release from UNH (with my name specifically mentioned). Amazing videos and photos of the launch have popped up everywhere, here are some:

The aurora seen from Fort Yukon. Image by UAF grad student Jason Ahrns.

The aurora seen from Fort Yukon. Image by UAF grad student Jason Ahrns.

The aurora seen from Fort Yukon. Image by UAF grad student Jason Ahrns.

This all-sky image from Poker Flat catches the MICA launch beautifully.

Here’s the aurora as seen from the science building at Poker Flat. The green beam you see is LIDAR (the same thing as RADAR, but using lasers).

Again here you can see the LIDAR beam, but now with a lot more red (nitrogen) emission in the sky.

Here’s an amazing shot of the rocket’s initial motor burning.

Here you see the second stage firing, the streak coming back to the ground is the spent first stage motor.

Here’s a glimpse of the rocket taken by a passerby on the Steese Expressway that passes by the range out of Fairbanks.

Thanks for all who followed this blog through the launch, I hope you found this adventure as fun and interesting as I did and I hope that you’ll continue following this blog as I chronicle my experiences in grad school and new science that’s happening around the world.

MICA rocket launch, part 6…

Hi all, we are now on day 6 of the launch window that opened on Monday night. It’s been a pretty long week, the days all seem to blend together and everything is even more skewed because we’re on a semi-night schedule, the window is open from 8pm to 2am.

Here’s a run down of the week:

• Launch Window Day #1 — Mon 2/13 8pm-2am– The first few hours of the window were used for final preparations and checks on the payload by the Wallops crew down at Poker Flat.  We had some breaks in the clouds, but the aurora was not strong enough or in the right place to consider launching. It’s good for us though, because we were better able to arrange our equipment here at Fort Yukon.

The final full layout of all of the UAF and UNH electronics.

The control box that handled the electronics, GPS, and gain control for the camera.

Here’s the 7″ display screen and DVD recorder we used to see and record the camera footage.

Here’s the Xybion setup

Here I am Skyping with the science team at the Research Range back in Fairbanks.

Hans and Jason from UAF work on some pointing for their cameras.

• Launch Window Day #2 – Tues 2/14 8pm-2:30am – So, the way the launch works is prior to the start of the window we count down from T-2 hours to T-10 minutes, “T-” means time to launch. Then we hold at T-10 minutes until we get some promising aurora, when we advance the countdown to T-2 minutes. Then we hold there until we get ideal conditions and decide to launch. Tuesday night we dropped the count down several times and had very good aurora, but it did not organize itself into the type of arcs in the right place, that we are trying to study.  The aurora was absolutely amazing. It was my first time ever really seeing it and it was absolutely awesome in the most basic sense of the word. We got quite a show here at Fort Yukon and standing outside it seemed like I couldn’t turn around fast enough to see all of the amazing activity. It was absolutely breathtaking. I wish everyone the opportunity to see it, it’s right up there with natural wonders like the Grand Canyon; I know these videos don’t quite capture the awe of the aurora that you get in person, but here are a few time-lapse videos from that night (aurora 1, aurora 2, aurora 3). This night we came very, very close to launching, getting as low as 36 seconds from liftoff before holding the count.  The auroral activity was actually much greater than anyone here or elsewhere would have predicted (this article is a great example of bad pop-science writing).  And the skies were clear at most of our sites for more than half of the launch window.  Extended the window to 2:30 am in hopes of getting the aurora to reorganize into arcs, but it never did.

• Launch Window Day #3 – Wed 2/15 8pm-1:30am — It was a quiet night for two reasons: there was very little aurora and there was poor visibility at our down range sites (aka where I am). Just about the exact opposite of the previous night with hours of aurora and nearly launching.  Scrubbed at 1:30 am due to clouds at down range sites and low geomagnetic activity.  A videographer from the Discovery Channel filmed the launch pad, inside the blockhouse, the vertical checks inside the telemetry building, and the Science Operations Center, for a future documentary. I was pretty bummed about not being around for that…I guess I missed my 15 minutes.

• Launch Window Day #4 — Thurs 2/16 8pm-2am — Clear skies up north for the entire window was very encouraging.  An arc formed in the far north early in the window and slowly moved south and then intensified.  We dropped the count to 2 minutes and held there for just over an hour as we watched the arc develop some structure briefly and then become more diffuse.  It never materialized into anything useful.

• Launch Window Day #5 — Fri 2/17 8pm-2am — The skies were clear for most of the night up north, but we didn’t see much action until about half way through the window. An arc formed in the far north early in the window and slowly moved south and then intensified.  We dropped the count to 2 minutes and held, the results were very similar to the previous night.  Still no launch.

MICA rocket launch, part 5…

Hello all, greetings from within the Arctic Circle. Yes that’s right, on Friday I safely arrived in Fort Yukon, Alaska (66º 34.39′ N, 145º 15.03′ W), about 125 miles northeast of Fairbanks and about 1.5 degrees (8 miles) into the Artic Circle. The flight up was fairly horrifying to begin with, the plane only had 9 seats, 7 of which were empty; that’s right, it was me, the other grad student working on the campaign and the pilots. At first I was mortified because I was sitting within 5 feet of the engine propeller, but once we had taken off and gotten above the clouds my mood immediately changed. Soaring above the mass of clouds as the sun rose was absolutely breathtaking and immediately soothed my nerves. At times it was hard to tell when it was clouds below us and when it was snowy mountains. All in all the flight was good and less than an hour after takeoff we had landed.

We (University of Alaska-Fairbanks grad student Jason and I) got a quick tour of the village of Fort Yukon. It’s a very small little place, with a population of about 700 people and almost all of them are natives who’ve lived here their whole lives. There are no roads in or out; in the winter you can use snowmobiles or dog sleds or fly and in the summer locals use river barges. Possibly the oddest part is the high number of junked cars that litter the town; many of them look like they have been abandoned, sitting for decades with broken windows and rust and snow on the inside. Between all the busted cars and the small dilapidated and abandoned houses, the village almost resembles something out of a movie about the nuclear apocalypse.

On Saturday we spent the day unpacking and setting up our video and camera equipment. In addition to my (in comparison) dinky Xybion ICCD (intensified charge-coupled device) video camera, Jason and the UAF folks have several very impressive cameras and video cameras plus some very fancy equipment to run and house them. Last night we were sitting around waiting for the aurora to show up, but it never did. It’s being pesky. Meanwhile, back at Poker Flat, the Wallops folks have finished the rocket’s final assembly and moved it to the rail to begin final preparations for launch. Saturday night they performed a practice launch count and had Sunday off to get onto a night schedule to begin the campaign. So far we’ve been “socked in” due to clouds at Fort Yukon, but the folks down at Poker Flat have seen some pretty nice aurora. It’s like the aurora’s mocking me, teasing me, showing up where and when it knows I can’t see it…pesky aurora. In any case, we’ve been tracking the auroral forecast from spaceweather.com and things are looking very promising. We have a very large sunspot with a lot of potential facing towards Earth, which could mean some very good auroral activity in the next few days.

The sunrise over the clouds on the way to Fort Yukon.

The small 9-seat plane that took me and my colleague from Fairbanks to Fort Yukon.

The official welcome sign to Fort Yukon, 8 miles into the Arctic Circle.

Not quite sure who made this one, but it was also on display (more prominently actually) at the airport.

The town didn’t look like much, the main street touted a community rec center, the cultural center, general store, post office, school and church.

Here’s a full view of the facilities where we stayed.

Originally built as an Air Force base, the station is now maintained by a third-party contractor called Arctec.

These are mobile observatories built and operated by the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. These three structures housed 4 cameras that supported the MICA mission.

We ran dozens of cables and connectors, many of which were not too happy to be exposed to sub-zero temperatures.

Those few cameras required quite a bit of hardware and software to control.

I only had one camera to manage, a relatively small portion of the amassed electronics.

Here’s the Xybion ICCD (Intensified Charge Coupled Device) camera that I controlled. It took real-time video of the aurora that I recorded to DVD.

The payload in its final state before attaching the nosecone.

Here’s the nosecone being lowered onto the payload.

Here’s the rocket payload with the nosecone one. The only parts of the rocket that aren’t attached here are the 2 rocket motors.

MICA rocket launch, part 4…

Over the last few days, the team at Poker Flat has made a lot of progress with the MICA rocket. We did hit a bit of a hiccup when we discovered on Monday that the installed GPS sensor on the rocket’s main payload was fried. The GPS is extremely important, as you can imagine, for the control and tracking of the rocket. This discovery was made during our initial payload “rollout”. A “rollout” means that we bring the payload (roughly the entire rocket) outside into the cold so that we can test the GPS signal and the transmission of data to and from the Telemetry building. Now of course it’s really cold, so we have to cover the rocket in lots of thermal blankets. You can see some pics below. During that time we also turned on the DERPAs to make sure the data showed that they were working properly. Everything looked good.  But even without the GPS we’ve been plenty busy with things.

On Tuesday, we tested the DERPA boom for the first time. The concept of the rocket payload is that once the rocket reaches space (a height at which it is clear of most of the atmosphere) the payload will be isolated and in free fall. At that point, small pyros (explosives) will be ignited, freeing all of the instruments that have been stowed on the main payload, safely tucked in beneath the nosecone. Once the pyros blow, the boom arms holding the instruments will be deployed. Of course, we need to test these booms before we launch to prove that the arm won’t break off. We tested the boom by deploying it at 45-degree angle and it latched very successfully, just as we planned. Here’s a link to a video of the deployment test.

Later in the day we went through a full sequence test. This is where we simulate an entire countdown and launch in the computers. Meaning, we don’t actually launch, but we do a countdown and turn the instruments on and off and deploy the booms at the correct times to make sure that the computers register all of the activity correctly. Everything went extremely well in the sequence test, yet another good sign.

The GPS failure was only a slight setback, the good folks back at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia sent us a backup and we finally got her installed yesterday (Wednesday). After that we had a sub-payload “rollout”, same procedure as we had on Monday for the main payload; everything on the sub (including the ERPA) worked nicely.

Here’s the payload very near completion. The front (left) half is the main payload where the DERPA sits. It will be covered by the nosecone.

The sun setting on the bundled up main payload.

Here’s the well-covered main payload outside the Payload Assembly Building for “rollout”.

Here’s another grad student and I looking over the data read outs during our sequence test.

Here are the Dartmouth experimenters working on one of their instruments.

Here is the DERPA, freed from its restraining band for the first time.

Here are the PI and me working on the DERPA deployment test.

Here’s the DERPA boom fully deployed for the first time.

Here’s another view of the fully deployed DERPA boom.

Here’s me with the DERPA I built.

Here’s a view of the main payload almost finished. All we need to do is slide the nosecone over the experiment section at the front (left).

Here’s the almost completed sub-payload wearing its skirt, outer shell. You can see the ERPA through the hole in the top.

So as you can see everything’s been moving along nicely. Today (Thursday) is actually my last day on the range. Tomorrow I’ll be heading up into the Arctic Circle, to Fort Yukon. The maximum height of the rocket’s trajectory, or apogee, will actually be just west of Fort Yukon. Here’s actually a map that shows the flight trajectory for MICA. The launch site at Poker Flat is near the bottom. Fort Yukon can be seen where the two rivers (blue squiggly lines) diverge between 66- and 67-degrees latitude. The target-like blue reticle is the targeted landing site. The black line running almost due north from Poker Flat to the center of the blue target is the proposed flight trajectory. The red zones emanating from the launch site are the different zones of influence for the launch; these basically rate how significantly the launch will influence these areas. Ideally we’ll be looking to launch into a stable auroral arc almost directly over Fort Yukon. I’ll be stationed there taking images of the aurora to help support the launch.

MICA rocket launch, part 3…

Well folks after a very Super weekend (Go Giants!), we’re back at Poker Flat Research Range and another week of rocket preparation. Over the past few days of work, we’ve done initial instrument turn ons for the Dual ERPA (DERPA) on the main payload. On Saturday (yes, we worked on Saturday), I actually got to do work. I mounted the ERPA onto the sub-payload and did the initial turn on. When we work with the payload or sub-payload all the scientists and engineers need to wear specialized blue anti-static lab coats. You might also notice in some photos that the engineers and scientists have cables hanging off their wrists. These are special cables that clamp onto the piece of equipment that we’re working on and attach to a wrist bracelet to keep us from having a static discharge while working on the instruments. An electric shock, even the small ones you get from socks on the carpet, could be enough concentrated charge to fry the circuitry we’re working with. So we have to be very cautious about static charge, especially since there’s almost no humidity here; that means that electric charge can jump or spark across a gap even more easily. But so far everything has looked perfect with the instruments. So that’s definitely a good thing, knock on wood.

Here are some photo updates of what’s been going on.

Here’s the display showing that UNH is “ON”. This means the ERPAs are active.

Here I am checking the ERPA data print out

Here’s an example of the ERPA data sheet, this was for about 2 minutes of data.

This is our PI, Steve, and I bolting down the ERPA.

Mounting the shielding to protect the ERPA.

Bolting down the shielding

Removing some of the protective tape

Getting ready to unhook ourselves from the ERPA

Here’s the sub-payload ERPA all set to go.

MICA rocket launch, part 2…

Things at the Rocket Assembly Building at Poker Flat Research Range have been quite slow for me. It’s been an awful lot of sitting around and waiting with nothing to do. I did get to tour the Telemetry (or TM, that’s the fancy name for the rocket’s communications and data transfer) and science buildings. The Principal Investigator (the guy in charge) even took me and another grad student sledding. That was fun. The view back into the valley that the range sits in is beautiful.

Last night there was a bit of a setback when the range (and a fair bit of the city of Fairbanks) lost power. The newspaper this morning attributed the outage to a failed insulator and luckily everything is back up and running now with very minor impact on the mission.

The good folks from Wallops Flight Facility have been working very hard at getting all of the pieces of the payload together. The rocket is a two-stage TERRIER-BLACK BRANT MK1 (Mark 1). That means it’s has two motors, a TERRIER and a BLACK BRANT IX. The rocket’s payload looks something like this:

Here's the layout for the MICA sounding rocket, a Black Brant IX rocket. "Exp" means "experiment", "NMACS" is the automated control system that controls the rocket, telemetry is the rocket's communication or data relay systems, the "BB Ign" is the BLACK BRANT ignition. To the right in the layout (or below all of the payload) would be the two rocket motors.

All of the science experiments sit in the Aft Exp area, that’s the main payload, or in the sub-payload section. There are two ERPA instruments that I built (explained in a previous post) on a boom on the main payload and one mounted to the front deck of the sub-payload. Once the both stages (both motors) have fired, the nosecone will detach from the payload and then the main and sub-payloads will separate and the instruments will turn on. This involves booms being extended too. The payload’s full instrument suite looks like this:

Here's a full diagram of MICA's science instruments. The ERPAs which I built are located in a pair on a boom on the main payload (depicted here on the right side) and at the front (top) of the sub-payload.

Below are some pictures from around the range and the ERPAs on the main payload.

Here’s a view from the Assembly Building towards the Main Building where we need to sign in and out every day.

Here’s a view back down at the range from the top of the hill where the Telemetry building sits. The two long blue structures are covers for the launch pads. The structures actually sit on rail-like tracks that allow them to be rolled back to expose the launch pads.

Here are the computers and printers that receive and print out the data from each of the rocket’s instruments.

NASA has very harsh methods for dealing with failures at the rocket range…

Here’s a look at the rocket being assembled. The longer section to the right is the main payload. The middle piece is the telemetry section.

Here we see the Dual ERPA (DERPA, the black and yellow looking block on the long cylindrical rod). After launch, when the boom is ready to be deployed, a small pyro charge or spring at the bottom of the boom arm will activate, lowering the DERPA into position.

Here’s a side view of the Dual ERPA (DERPA) on the main payload

Here’s the sub-payload as it sits getting its batteries charged.

MICA rocket launch, part 1…

So as I told you in my last post, I’m travelling to Alaska to launch a NASA sounding rocket from Poker Flat Rocket Range. Well, now I’m safely in Fairbanks, after roughly 23 hours of travel and three flights (Boston to Houston, Houston to Seattle, Seattle to Fairbanks). Flying into Seattle at twilight I got to see the Space Needle which was really cool. Flying into Fairbanks was sort of creepy; all you can see  out the window is blackness as far as you can see and except for one little cottage or house lit up. Then all of a sudden we were in Fairbanks, kinda came out of nowhere. The city itself is very wide open and rather un-city-like. There is a very large shopping center with Lowe’s, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and several grocery stores. Everything is very spread out.

As far as the launch goes, my job has basically been a lot of sitting around. The main parts of the rocket and the payload arrived yesterday afternoon. At that point, all of the rocket folks from Wallops Air Force Base got to work on unpacking and prepping things; that’s also when I and the experimenters from Dartmouth left. Today is more of the same for me, sitting around waiting. Our instrument, the ERPA, is already on the rocket, so I just need to wait until they’re all set putting stuff together. Yippee.

Now, about the weather. I cannot believe how beautiful and cold it is here. The sun rises at around 9am every day and sets a little after 4pm; so we’re not in total darkness. But it never gets really bright; although that might be because of the clouds. The sky hasn’t been very clear yet, which is a bit of a disappointment. Hopefully it’ll clear up soon so we can see some stars, let alone aurora. Driving out to the rocket range my first day I was amazed by how beautiful the landscape; it’s extremely barren and everything is frozen but it’s breathtaking. The mountains and valleys covered with snow and frost-covered trees is awe-inspiring. We even saw the Alaskan (oil) pipeline and some moose. I can’t really explain how cold it is here, was -32 degrees F yesterday morning when we left. Every parking lot where you leave your car for an extended period of time actually has outlets to plug your car into an engine block heater or it won’t start again. It’s crazy. The initial breath when you walk outside hurts your lungs and the inside of your nose freezes almost immediately. Luckily bundling up hasn’t been too much of an issue, but I haven’t really been outside for prolonged periods of time yet.

Yes, that’s right, the temperature at the rocket range our first day was -31 degrees F.

Here are my fellow experimenters from Dartmouth and Cornell.

The payload arrives after its journey from Wallops Air Force Base in Virginia

Here are most of the components of the payload before they were unpacked

Here’s the rocket’s nose cone (the front tip)

A return and departure…

Hello all, welcome to 2012 and back to The Sky’s the Limit. Without much ado, let’s get things rolling with some very cool new updates.

• RESEARCH UPDATE: My research has been going along quite swimmingly. Loyal readers will remember back in the summer when I posted about receiving a research fellowship from NASA. This summer, as a part of that project, I began building an instrument for the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling in the Alfvén resonator (MICA) sounding rocket mission. The instrument, called an Electron Retarding Potential Analyzer (ERPA), is what’s known as a “top hat” electrostatic analyzer. This means, the ERPA uses electric fields to attract/guide electrons into the detector and measure their energy. Acquiring an energy distribution of a population of particles, in this case electrons, gives us a temperature. Electron temperature is just one small part of the in situmeasurements the MICA rocket will make as it flies through the aurora over Alaska. Below are some pictures of the ERPAs as they were being built.

  

  Here are the parts for the four ERPA instruments as I received them fresh from being created in the machine shop. The rings and casings are made of aluminum and the collimators of brass.

  

  Here are the ERPA parts laid out after “blacking”, where we coat the metallic elements of the instrument to keep them from giving off extra electrons when they’re exposed to sunlight (photoelectric effect).

  
  

  

  Here is a completed ERPA. The tall, cylindrical part is the actual detector where the electrons will be measured. It’s made up of a series of insulators, rings, and fine mesh screens.

  

  This bottom view of the ERPA shows the computer board and electronics that control the instrument. The large metallic circle to the right is the actual detector where the electrons hit.

  
  
  

  The ERPAs were then shipped down to Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia for testing and integration with the rest of the MICA payload’s instruments. They’re now be shipped to Alaska for launch. Yes, that’s right I said Alaska, where I will be heading next week for launch myself. The rocket will be launched from Poker Flat Rocket Range, just outside Fairbanks, where I’ll spend a week preparing the ERPAs for launch before I fly up to Fork Yukon (see map below) where I’ll take images of the aurora from the ground as the rocket flies through it.

Map of Alaska showing where I'll be during the MICA launch. Poker Flat is right in the middle of the state, just northeast of the city of Fairbanks. I'll then fly to Fort Yukon, about 100 miles north.

• At the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (which is oddly always held in December) out in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of meeting two very cool people. The first was UNH Alumnus and current NASA researcher C. Alex Young, who has created a very cool website called The Sun Today which offers facts about the Sun, updates on solar weather, and a whole lot more stellar media and information (sorry for the pun). You should check out the website and visit the Facebook page for more info. The second person I met was a very awesome little gal named Camilla. Camilla is a chicken that works for NASA. In fact, Camilla is a chicken that is training to become an astronaut. As part of the public eduction and outreach for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), Camilla has joined the Astronaut Training Program and is quickly on her way into space. For more information about Camilla and the exciting stuff she’s up to, you can check out her Facebook page or her about.me website. I even got a picture with her!

Here's me and Camilla hanging at a restaurant in San Francisco. I was obviously way more excited about this introduction than she was...

•  Finally, since I can’t leave you without an awesome picture, here is a great shot of the Sun celebrating the Chinese New Year. As explained by the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (Little SDO) Facebook page:

Gong Xi Fa Ca! Happy Chinese New Year. It is the Year of the Dragon, the most powerful of the Chinese zodiac.

A month in the Chinese calendar spans a single lunar cycle. The first day of the month begins during the new moon, when no sunlight falls on the lunar hemisphere that faces the Earth. A lunar cycle, on average, lasts 29.5 days, so a lunar month can last 29 or 30 days. Usually, there are 12 lunar months in a Chinese calendar year. In order to catch up with the solar calendar, which averages 365.25 days in a year, an extra month is added to the Chinese calendar every two or three years. As a result, Chinese New Year falls on different dates each year (in the Gregorian calendar) between January 21 and February 21.

Each year of the Chinese lunar calendar is represented by one of twelve animal symbols of the Chinese zodiac: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Boar. For 2012, it’s the dragon’s turn. According to Chinese astrology, people born on the year of the dragon are said to be strong, self-assured, eccentric, intellectual, and passionate, among other things.Chinese New Year celebrations traditionally lasts 15 days, from the first day (during a new moon) to the 15th day (a full moon). Each day holds a special significance that varies according to local traditions. 

This amazing image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a fierce (slightly enhanced) coronal mass ejection (CME)- a blob of super hot and super energetic particles- blasting off the surface of the Sun.

Getting your rocks off…

Hello all you loyal readers out there, sorry for the lack of posts this summer, but it’s just so nice outside and it’s hard to see with the sunlight reflecting off my screen. In any case there’s a lot going on down in Washington regarding budgets and debt and all that good economics stuff (read: things that I don’t really understand or care to), so I figure I’ll just ignore that and talk about some fun space stuff!

• First off, as this blog has been (or attempting to) chronicling for most of the summer, NASA finally ended the Space Shuttle program after the successful return of the final mission of Atlantis on July 21. The shuttle ran an amazing 30 year history and is still to this day the most sophisticated vehicle ever constructed by man. NASA and the U.S. government now have to wait and hope (with bated breath and some hard finger crossing) that private companies quickly ramp up the development and advancement of private launch capabilities. Several big-time frontrunners in the commercialization of space exploration (SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, etc.) have hit major setbacks, failures, and are going way over budget.

• Next up, here is a very cool picture from the Opportunity rover on Mars. Yes, that’s right Opportunity found metal on Mars! How cool is that!??!! But yeah, not the giant pieces of scrap metal that are in the background, NASA is actually interested in that strange metallic-looking rock in the foreground to the left. That’s the real prize. The scrap metal (which I  half expected to see wrecked R2-D2 and C-3PO somewhere near…) is not some failed attempt at Martians to reach space, it’s actually Opportunity‘s own heat shielding that was abandoned during the rover’s descent back in 2004. The rock though, found to be made mostly of dense metals iron and nickel, is thought to be just as alien to Mars as Opportunity‘s heat shielding. Scientists believe the rock to be a meteorite much like the vast number found in Antarctica here on Earth.

It's not the scrap metal here that interests scientists, but the small metallic rock in the left foreground.

• In a news story that is too weird to be made up, a man recently released from jail, is finally having the story told of how he stole moon rocks from NASA. A new book, Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History by Ben Mezrich (the author of the books Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires, the movies behind 21 and The Social Network respectively), focuses on the story of then-24-year-old Thad Roberts, a former Mormon from Utah, who stole an entire safe full (not just the rocks in the safe, but the ENTIRE safe) of moon rocks from a lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston back in 2002. Why, you ask, would the wanna-be astronaut pull off such an audacious crime? For the love of a girl he’d met only three weeks prior…so he claims. In any case the article and book detail the robbery and how the couple celebrated the crime on the 33rd anniversary of first moon walk by being intimate ON the rocks (hence the pun of this post’s title). The short summary is, people are weird, but this book HAS to be a page-turner.

Fellowship of the ring…

Hello all. Wow, this summer is flying and unfortunately I have been skirting my blogging duties, but never fear, I am here with a post.

Firstly, a little update on why I’ve been so quiet. We’ve been quite busy in the lab finishing up proposals. Just to give you an idea, in a two week span my boss had 4 proposals due, meaning the graduate student office was like a sweatshop of proofreaders. All in all we got them all finished and are pretty optimistic about them, but things were pretty hectic for awhile. While all that was going on, I received word from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center that I was awarded one of their Graduate Student Research Program (GSRP) fellowships; basically I guess that means I work for NASA now (life goal #1, accomplished). It’s not really that big of a deal though, it just means that I have my own money to pay my stipend and will allow me to fund my own trips to conferences and buy my own resource materials without having to get paid off my boss’s grants. In return for all of this great NASA funding, I’ll be working with a Goddard scientist (Dr. Thomas Moore) and will have to make trips down to Greenbelt, Maryland to meet with him regularly and attend a symposium down there with all the other fellowship recipients in September. Seems like a pretty sweet deal to me.

In related science news, I spent last week at a scientific conference in Santa Fe, NM (a safe distance from the wildfires- although we could see them on the horizon). The conference, the National Science Foundation‘s (NSF) Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) annual workshop, was actually a joint session with another group of scientists, NSF’s Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) and was attended by roughly 400 scientists from all over the world. In case you haven’t figured it out, scientists can be sort of snooty and extremely specialized (read cliquey) when it comes to their science. Because of that there a several different annual conferences that break the larger realm of space physics down into subclasses; GEM is for people who study primarily Earth’s magnetosphere (the realm of influence of Earth’s magnetic field), while CEDAR is for those who focus on the ionosphere (the uppermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere), then of course there’s NSF’s Solar, Heliospheric, and INterplanetary Environment (SHINE) conference that focuses on the Sun and the region between the Sun and Earth. Yeah, lots of sub-categorization and sub-classification, although a lot of these people tend to work on similar things. For example, the research my group does involves the aurora, a phenomena that technically involves both the magnetosphere and ionosphere, but you can’t really be both a CEDAR person and a GEM person (since the conferences are usually held simultaneously in different places). It’s so odd. In any case though, the meeting was very interesting; long days of talks and finally meeting people who I’ll be working with and have been hearing about since I started in the lab. It seems like the sounding rocket community who my lab work with are a great bunch of people, so I’m very excited about that. But now I kind of need a week of recuperation after a week of science; conferences are not for the faint of heart.

So as I get back to the daily grind of laboratory work, I will leave you all with an interesting article from space.com‘s comprehensive coverage of the end of the space shuttle program (Atlantis is slated to launch this Friday, July 8, on the final mission) that asks whether or not the space shuttle program was worth the $209 billion it cost. In my mind it absolutely was; the space shuttle is still to this day the most advanced vehicle ever built by humans. What do you think though?