Received an e-mail from Louis Friedman, that he sent
to the Planetary Society members.
You probably got it didn't you?
hmmmm, maybe not a Planetary Society member, well I copied it below. :-)
- LRK -
We have been waiting for spacecraft to go back to the Moon, and now we
have some there.
We have a lot of activity at Mars on the ground and in orbit. Watch and
see if they get visited by an asteroid.
People are still wondering about the Pioneer Anomaly.
The Voyagers are still on their way through space.
Take a look at the list of SPACE MISSIONS at the Planetary link.
http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/groups/
More news at
http://www.planetary.org/news/
Next Year Should Be Even Better, Yes.
[Make sure your representatives will be supporting your interest in space.]
Thanks for looking up with me.
Larry Kellogg
Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsletter: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
==============================================================
As a member of the Planetary Society, received the e-mail below from
Louis Friedman. - LRK -
http://planetary.org/about/founders/louis_friedman.html
--------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Planetary Society Member,
*The year 2007 has been a rich and rewarding one* for us space
explorers. It is breathtaking to consider the pace of solar system
exploration -- 20 spacecraft are now beyond Earth orbit sending back
data from all over the solar system.
*You, as a member of The Planetary Society,* are part of humanity's move
off Earth and out into the solar system. Right now, the names of
Planetary Society members are flying around the rings of Saturn on
/Cassini/, on the Red Planet with /Spirit/ and /Opportunity/, traveling
to the asteroid belt with /Dawn/, cruising around the Moon on /Kaguya/,
heading toward the north pole of Mars on /Phoenix/, and journeying to
Pluto on /New Horizons/.
*The past year we took an important new step:* We added the Earth to our
mission. Our mission statement now reads: /"To inspire the people of
Earth to explore other worlds, understand our own, and seek life
elsewhere."/
*Consider this: *Earth sits between two examples of planets gone bad --
at least, as far as life is concerned. Venus was overtaken by a runaway
greenhouse effect, which boiled away its oceans and raised the surface
temperature to the point it would melt lead. Mars lost its once thick
and protective atmosphere, and now it's a world where any liquid water
that happened to appear on its surface would immediately transform to a
gas.
*Planetary science has taught us these lessons,* but we have much more
to learn. We explore other worlds to understand this one. Only by seeing
Earth as one planet among many can we truly understand our own pale blue
dot of a world.
*Philosophically and scientifically,* we always treated Earth as a
planet, but we didn't trumpet that fact, out of concern that some people
might think The Planetary Society was weakening our stance that
exploring other worlds is a human imperative. But after more than a
quarter-century of being the world's largest and most effective space
advocacy group, surely no one can now seriously believe we're backing down.
*We've added to our mission statement,* while taking nothing away. We'll
be doing all this while continuing to campaign to keep planetary
exploration robust. While we advance the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence. While we support research into the threat posed by
near-Earth comets and asteroids. And while we lead the International
Lunar Decade to maximize the scientific return from the many missions
now targeting Earth's Moon.
*This means that, in the coming year, *we're going to need your help and
support even more. You know how active The Planetary Society is.
*You are part of everything we do.* I look forward to exploring the
future in space -- and on Earth -- with you.
With best wishes for the coming year,
Louis Friedman
Louis Friedman
Executive Director
P.S. We land on Mars this coming May 25 -- and I mean "we" literally.
The Planetary Society's "/Visions of Mars/" is riding on the /Phoenix/
spacecraft, carrying the first library to another planet. It's just one
more thing we've accomplished together.
Thank you.
Snip
==============================================================
http://www.planetary.org/news/2007/1226_The_Year_in_Pictures_2007.html
The Year in Pictures: 2007
*By Emily Lakdawalla *
December 26, 2007
The year 2007 certainly has been one of the most active in planetary
exploration. Of the 20 robotic spacecraft in operation, 11 returned
images to Earth from four planets plus numerous moons, including our own
recently neglected natural satellite.
Snip
[Go to the web site to see images and links to more. - LRK -]
==============================================================
http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/groups/
Space Topics
All Space Topics by Group
EXPLORE
Snip
[I won't include all the links this time, you will just have to go to
the web site. :-) - LRK -]
==============================================================
WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK
==============================================================
Showing posts with label missions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label missions. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Monday, April 09, 2007
When bad launches happen to good companies
------------------------------------------------------
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/847/1
by Jeff Foust
Monday, April 9, 2007
Over the last decade the commercial launch industry has experienced a series of ups and downs. The industry was doing quite well in the late 1990s, riding the telecom boom and the development of several large constellations of low Earth orbit communications satellites. The boom went bust early this decade, and the industry went into the doldrums, with a sharp drop in launch demand and even the withdrawal of vehicles like the Delta 4, which Boeing took off the commercial launch market because prices had dropped dramatically in response to the low demand. In the last couple of years, though, the market has improved, with increased demand and rising prices (see “Is the launch industry on the rebound?”, The Space Review, February 20, 2006).
Snip
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hope Sea Launch figures out what went wrong and can launch again soon.
LRK
Thanks for looking up with me.
Larry Kellogg
Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsletter: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
==============================================================
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Sunday, February 25, 2007
The Study of the Pioneer Anomaly:
The Study of the Pioneer Anomaly:
New Data and Objectives for New Investigation
Slava G. Turyshev, a
Viktor T. Toth, b
Larry R. Kellogg, c
Eunice. L. Lau, a and
Kyong J. Lee, a
a Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology,
4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
b vttoth.com, 3-575 Old St Patrick St., Ottawa ON K1N 9H5, Canada
c NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA 1
1 Contractor to NASA Ames Research Center employed by Bendix Field Engineering Corporation early on and Orbital Sciences Corporation at the end of the Pioneer missions; presently retired.
Abstract
The Pioneer 10/11 spacecraft yielded the most precise navigation in deep space to date. However, their radiometric tracking data has consistently indicated the presence of a small, anomalous, Doppler frequency drift. The drift is a blue shift, uniformly changing with a rate of 6 × 10−9 Hz/s and can be interpreted as a constant sunward acceleration of each particular spacecraft of aP = (8.74 ±1.33) × 10−10 m/s2 (or, alternatively, a time acceleration of at = (2.92 ± 0.44) × 10−18 s/s2). This signal has become known as the Pioneer anomaly; the nature of this anomaly remains unexplained. We discuss the current state of the efforts to retrieve the entire data sets of the Pioneer 10 and 11 radiometric Doppler data. We also report on the availability of recently recovered telemetry files that may be used to reconstruct the engineering history of both spacecraft using original project documentation and newly developed software tools. We discuss possible ways to further investigate the discovered effect using these telemetry files in conjunction with the analysis of the much extended Pioneer Doppler data.
In preparation for this new upcoming investigation, we summarize the current knowledge of the
Pioneer anomaly and review some of the mechanisms proposed for its explanation. We emphasize the main objectives of this new study, namely i) analysis of the early data that could yield the true direction of the anomaly and thus, its origin, ii) analysis of planetary encounters, that should tell more about the onset of the anomaly (e.g. Pioneer 11’s Saturn flyby), iii) analysis of the entire dataset, that should lead to a better determination of the temporal behavior of the anomaly, iv) comparative analysis of individual anomalous accelerations for the two Pioneers with the data taken from similar heliocentric distances, v) the detailed study of on-board systematics, and vi) development of a thermal-electric-dynamical model using on-board telemetry. The outlined strategy may allow for a higher accuracy solution for the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft and, possibly, will lead to an unambiguous determination of the origin of the Pioneer anomaly.
Contents
1 Introduction 2
2 The Pioneer Anomaly and the Search for its Origin 5
2.1 The Pioneer Anomaly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 Original Efforts to Explain the Anomaly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.1 Effects with Sources External to the Spacecraft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.2 Study of the On-Board Systematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.3 Computational Systematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3 Recent Efforts to Explain the Anomaly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3.1 Search for Independent Confirmation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3.2 Conventional Physics Mechanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3.3 Possibility for New Physics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3 Recovery of the Extended Pioneer Doppler Data Set 10
3.1 Doppler Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.2 Pioneer Doppler Data Formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.2.1 ATDF – Archival Tracking Data File (Format TRK-2-25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.2.2 ODF – Orbit Data File (Format TRK-2-18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.3 Retrieval of the Pioneer Doppler Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.4 Current Status of the Data Recovery Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4 Pioneer Telemetry and On-Board Systematics 16
4.1 Master Data Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.1.1 MDR Media and Data Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.1.2 Data Integrity and Completeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
4.1.3 Interpreting the Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
4.1.4 Decoding Analog Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
4.1.5 Software Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4.2 Available Telemetry Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4.3 What Can Telemetry Tell Us About the Spacecraft? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
5 A Strategy to Find the Origin of the Pioneer Anomaly 26
5.1 Analysis of the Earlier Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
5.2 Study of the Planetary Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5.3 Analysis of the Entire Data Span . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5.4 Analysis of the Individual Trajectories for Both Pioneers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5.5 Investigation of the On-Board Systematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5.5.1 Radio Beam Reaction Force . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5.5.2 Anisotropic Heat Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
5.5.3 Differential Change of the RTG’s Radiant Emissivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
5.5.4 Constant Electrical Heat Radiation as the Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.5.5 Helium Expulsion from the RTGs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.5.6 Propulsive Mass Expulsion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
5.6 Building a Thermal/Electrical/Dynamical Model for the Pioneers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
6 Conclusion
Snip
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0512/0512121.pdf
Snip
======================================================
A bit selfish I know, but I don't want the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions to be lost to the general consciousness.
If you get to page 17 you can see some of what goes into pulling the health of the spacecraft out of the Master Data Records.
Was a lot of fun working in support of the Pioneer Missions.
Larry R. Kellogg
New Data and Objectives for New Investigation
Slava G. Turyshev, a
Viktor T. Toth, b
Larry R. Kellogg, c
Eunice. L. Lau, a and
Kyong J. Lee, a
a Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology,
4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
b vttoth.com, 3-575 Old St Patrick St., Ottawa ON K1N 9H5, Canada
c NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA 1
1 Contractor to NASA Ames Research Center employed by Bendix Field Engineering Corporation early on and Orbital Sciences Corporation at the end of the Pioneer missions; presently retired.
Abstract
The Pioneer 10/11 spacecraft yielded the most precise navigation in deep space to date. However, their radiometric tracking data has consistently indicated the presence of a small, anomalous, Doppler frequency drift. The drift is a blue shift, uniformly changing with a rate of 6 × 10−9 Hz/s and can be interpreted as a constant sunward acceleration of each particular spacecraft of aP = (8.74 ±1.33) × 10−10 m/s2 (or, alternatively, a time acceleration of at = (2.92 ± 0.44) × 10−18 s/s2). This signal has become known as the Pioneer anomaly; the nature of this anomaly remains unexplained. We discuss the current state of the efforts to retrieve the entire data sets of the Pioneer 10 and 11 radiometric Doppler data. We also report on the availability of recently recovered telemetry files that may be used to reconstruct the engineering history of both spacecraft using original project documentation and newly developed software tools. We discuss possible ways to further investigate the discovered effect using these telemetry files in conjunction with the analysis of the much extended Pioneer Doppler data.
In preparation for this new upcoming investigation, we summarize the current knowledge of the
Pioneer anomaly and review some of the mechanisms proposed for its explanation. We emphasize the main objectives of this new study, namely i) analysis of the early data that could yield the true direction of the anomaly and thus, its origin, ii) analysis of planetary encounters, that should tell more about the onset of the anomaly (e.g. Pioneer 11’s Saturn flyby), iii) analysis of the entire dataset, that should lead to a better determination of the temporal behavior of the anomaly, iv) comparative analysis of individual anomalous accelerations for the two Pioneers with the data taken from similar heliocentric distances, v) the detailed study of on-board systematics, and vi) development of a thermal-electric-dynamical model using on-board telemetry. The outlined strategy may allow for a higher accuracy solution for the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft and, possibly, will lead to an unambiguous determination of the origin of the Pioneer anomaly.
Contents
1 Introduction 2
2 The Pioneer Anomaly and the Search for its Origin 5
2.1 The Pioneer Anomaly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 Original Efforts to Explain the Anomaly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.1 Effects with Sources External to the Spacecraft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.2 Study of the On-Board Systematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.3 Computational Systematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3 Recent Efforts to Explain the Anomaly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3.1 Search for Independent Confirmation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3.2 Conventional Physics Mechanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3.3 Possibility for New Physics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3 Recovery of the Extended Pioneer Doppler Data Set 10
3.1 Doppler Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.2 Pioneer Doppler Data Formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.2.1 ATDF – Archival Tracking Data File (Format TRK-2-25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.2.2 ODF – Orbit Data File (Format TRK-2-18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.3 Retrieval of the Pioneer Doppler Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.4 Current Status of the Data Recovery Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4 Pioneer Telemetry and On-Board Systematics 16
4.1 Master Data Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.1.1 MDR Media and Data Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.1.2 Data Integrity and Completeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
4.1.3 Interpreting the Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
4.1.4 Decoding Analog Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
4.1.5 Software Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4.2 Available Telemetry Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4.3 What Can Telemetry Tell Us About the Spacecraft? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
5 A Strategy to Find the Origin of the Pioneer Anomaly 26
5.1 Analysis of the Earlier Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
5.2 Study of the Planetary Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5.3 Analysis of the Entire Data Span . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5.4 Analysis of the Individual Trajectories for Both Pioneers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5.5 Investigation of the On-Board Systematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5.5.1 Radio Beam Reaction Force . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5.5.2 Anisotropic Heat Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
5.5.3 Differential Change of the RTG’s Radiant Emissivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
5.5.4 Constant Electrical Heat Radiation as the Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.5.5 Helium Expulsion from the RTGs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.5.6 Propulsive Mass Expulsion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
5.6 Building a Thermal/Electrical/Dynamical Model for the Pioneers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
6 Conclusion
Snip
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0512/0512121.pdf
Snip
======================================================
A bit selfish I know, but I don't want the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions to be lost to the general consciousness.
If you get to page 17 you can see some of what goes into pulling the health of the spacecraft out of the Master Data Records.
Was a lot of fun working in support of the Pioneer Missions.
Larry R. Kellogg
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