Thanks for reading.
Dave
Went to work early, status meeting at 8 am, worked on Ace's materials for Huygens Probe Release (UTC Dec. 25 2004), mainly adapting Mission Plan graphics so they show only UTC ERT/TRM. Tried to print a poster-size copy on the HP plotter downstairs, but it didn't seem to want to finish before I shut down my desktop Mac.
Went to Greg's and Yuchen's house in La Canada at 11:30. Gave Mike a ride. Stopped to pick up chips&dip at Trader Joe's on the way. Almost all the MSSO staff was there. Herlen and Tibi had arrived at 7:30 am to set up BBQs in the driveway and start cookin' ribs and links from Texas. Greg gave us each a nice photographic quality 20x22-inch print of our choice of an image of Saturn and Rings taken on approach, the whole-disc UV/VIS/IR composite view of Titan, or the image above, taken Nov. 7, 2004 that shows the A and F Rings below shadows of the B and A Rings on Saturn's upper hydrogen atmosphere. Mimas, which creates the Cassini Division (visible at bottom right) in the rings via gravitation on a 1/2 orbit-period resonance, is visible on the right. The Enke Division in the A Ring, and the thin strand of an F Ring are visible. And you can almost pick out the fact that there is a Keeler Gap. Here's the caption. Yeah, that's the image I chose. It went up on the wall in the front room.
After helping Herlen and Tibi a little with cleaning and packing up, I took my print directly to Aaron Brothers for some framing.
When I drove to Aaron Brothers after calling and confirming the order would be ready to pick up, it was, "well y'know, like she didn't do it, and, like when I tried to, the mask cutting tool, like, broke, y'know, and, like, y'know I didn't know how to fix it, ok?"
Those aren't "Christmas" carols playing in the shopping centers. They're "Huygens Probe Release" carols.
Watched an Israeli movie that Mitch rented. We laughed our guts out at a Robin Williams interview on The Actors Studio. Soaked in hot tub.
Watched Meet The Press. My country's government is a mess. I do NOT agree with the directions we're being led. Bottom line from the show: Regarding troop capabilities, it's 24 months until we march over a cliff with the whole Iraq Mess (o' potamia). Mitch is off early to study with classmates for next week's EMT practica.
Started this 'bolg.
I'm sitting here in my office getting hungry for lunch, listening to my team member Johnny, callsign "Ace," on the voicenet. He's right now putting a command file's worth of packets on the uplink to the spacecraft. It will take an hour and 8 minutes to get there at the speed of light. These are the commands that turn the spacecraft, and fire the main rocket engine for a minute, to place the spacecraft on a collision course with Titan.
The PLAN, of course, is to release the European's Huygens Probe (on Christmas Eve PST, Christmas Day GMT). Then we command the Cassini orbiter to change course and avoid Titan by 60,000 km rather than impact it, which is what the Probe will do. Huygens will impact Titan's upper atmosphere, enter, and deploy parachutes for a 2.5-hour investigation of the atmosphere and surface.
So, I think I'll go get some lunch, and then think about maybe sneaking out early to go home, burn up some vacation hours while keeping in touch with the Ace.
My grade-school friend Ray Sabersky made the Ace sign when we were maybe 15 years old in high school. "Ace" was my nickname, because I was learning to fly a single-engine Cessna 150. Ray and I excahanged some email this afternoon. Thanks, Ray, for reminding me whose birthday is today.
Now the team is beginning to process the command to start taking images of the separated probe drifting away from Cassini. Maybe we should call it "Cassini Lite" now that it has parted company with 320 kg. All the accelerations and motions have been read back from the orbiter, so Nav is busily figuring out exactly where to tell AACS to point the cameras. Command Approval Meeting (CAM) at 11:30 pm in room 280A.
Caltech provided a very nice buffet dinner in the lobby earlier. The JPL director is here watching, along with the Caltech president, and the European Space Agency's science director. What a fun Christmas eve!
From the press release: "Today's release is another successful milestone in the Cassini-Huygens odyssey," said Dr. David Southwood, director of science program for the European Space Agency. "This was an amicable separation after seven years of living together. Our thanks to our partners at NASA for the lift. Each spacecraft will now continue on its own but we expect they'll keep in touch to complete this amazing mission. Now all our hopes and expectations are focused on getting the first in-situ data from a new world we've been dreaming of exploring for decades."
Our separation comes at a time when the U.S. is being seen a little differently in the world's eyes. I'm sad to say that JPL (a U.S. federally funded research and development facility) we've lately been forced to treat our international partners with extraordinary rudeness under what I see as very inappropriate restrictions. To bring their own laptops or cell phones to their offices requires enormous paper jiggling. They aren't even authorized to view web pages that they need to operate within their own Program. All to live within Section 38 of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, which is Subchapter M - International Traffic in Arms Regulations. ITAR. Yup, a potential symbol of the most peaceful cooperation possible between nations, Cassini/Huygens, gets treated by this Administration as if it were literally a "weapon."
When I came home for lunch earlier in the day, I met the the mail carrier bringing a present from Ray and Robin (!!), and one from Beah!
Got up early and exchanged presents at breakfast. Watched Early Morning in the Canyons from the Oak yard (the sky is clear and transparent, there's a marine layer influence just beginning to replace yesterday's Santa Ana's, and the air is cool and fresh). Found a nice card from Donald's sister Nancy in yesterday's mail. I'll call her tomorrow and say Happy Donald's Birthday. Will go in and relieve Johnny at the Ace console this afternoon, and also take some of Herlen's shift. Herlen scheduled himself a grusome swap, on Christmas no less, from days to nights with no time in between, so I'll do what I can to relieve the transition for him.
Finished working a few low-priority anomalies, one requiring a meeting and a command to the CAPS IMS instrument, then went home at noon-thirty to open all the doors and windows. It's a marvelous day, the air unstable from the rapid, wet cold front that sloshed through here over the last couple of days.
Every time Mitch brings in the LA Times from the front walkway the tsunami death toll has gone up by tens of thousands.
Looks pretty much like a whole day off. We gave up the Australian and Spanish stations that were scheduled for today, since we were able (that is, Huygens targeting, release, and imaging, and orbiter deflection went perfectly, so we can do some more science now) to command the s/c off earthpoint to execute a sequence of observations during Iapetus flyby. The Ace is staying home today. There CAN'T be any calls until after 10pm tonight when we AOS.
Iapetus should be pretty interesting. It's the little Ying-Yang moon with half and half black and white surface. Leading hemisphere is coated with Black Stuff, trailing is snow white.
The animation was created from 8 images taken August 22, 1981 by Voyager 2. There are bright mountain peaks in the dark material.
The sky is clearing. Last night's cold front wasn't nearly as wet or energetic. Time to go sit in the hot tub.
Watched the Rose Parade on TV while listening to the B-1 bomber and its escort fly through the area. No calls from the Ace; the Iapetus playback must have gone well.
But there have been no mishaps except where my sliding glass door installation was lacking caulk where it was needed. I'm hoping the wind won't come up until the ground under the trees has had a chance to dry and solidify a little more. That's how the last huge oak on this property got uprooted in 1998.
Lotsa worms are surfacing. Some even crawl into the house and become dried out "worm jerky" on the tile floor! Yummy. :-)
I'm working late tonight. We'll see the Cassini Orbiter spacecraft turn away just after midnight so it can listen for signals from Huygens at Titan. As soon as that happens I'm going to release the DSN station and go home and sleep. Tomorrow morning we'll see whether there's data from Huygens or not. If Huygens actually works, with all those instruments and experiments, it's going to be a huge, proud occasion for the European Space Agency!
I've been playing audio clips or, or whistling in the halls, the fourth movement of Beethoven's 9th, "Ode to Joy" all day.
Mitch woke me at 6:20 Friday morning on his way to breakfast (I elected to sleep in until 7 instead of attending our usual Friday morning breakfast out with friends, since I'd worked on the console till after midnight). He said congratulations, the parachutes had deployed. He had surfed the web and found the news.
Knowing Huygens' schedule by rote, I told him, "That must have been from some predicted timeline. We don't get that telemetry till 8:16 am." But what he had seen on the web was news from the radio scientists, led by Sami Asmar, using Earth-based radiotelescopes (Green Bank and Parkes). They were actually able to capture the tiny signal directly from Titan! And its Doppler shifts indicated having slowed to parachute speed. Hooray!
Got to work at 7:20 am and confirmed that all was well in the realtime slice across things. Cassini had just turned back to Earth-point, and we had the signal via the station in Canberra. At 8:16 am Cassini was playing back the data it had captured from Huygens up close (60,000 km) called its crosslink -- data transmitted across the distance between two spacecraft. By 10 am ESA confirmed 100% of the Xlink data had been returned. Press conference from Darmstadt showed an image that Huygens took 16 km above the surface, with very strange lobate features they described as "drainage channels" leading to what they said almost looked like a shoreline.
Our European friends are very, very happy.
"Is that a dobsonain telescope?" I asked when it was my turn, grinning, gesturing a namaste toward the old man (after all, he spent a couple of decades of his life as a Vedantic monk).
"Yes," he said, "and I'm John Dobson, how did you know I was here?" The button on his jacket said, "Nothing doesn't exist." "A little bird told me," I said. Jane recognized me about that time, ran over, and introduced me to John.
Jane and Mojo were there on the street corner with a total of three dobsonians, a small crowd of viewers, and the father of sidewalk astronomy. Jane was offering views of Saturn, a beautiful sight with Titan, Rhea, and Iapetus visible. This was the first time I'd seen it through a telescope since SOI. Mojo had Comet Machholz in his dob.
I hung around for a little while, steering viewers to the telescopes, and listening to John delight people with his educational descriptions and hypotheticals: "If you were to get in a Mercedes and drive at 60 miles per hour directly toward Saturn without stopping," he was telling a teenage girl, "then in one thousand two hundred years, Saturn would appear as big as it does in that telescope." He winked at me and said, "Ha! They always think I'll say you'd reach Saturn!"
Happy Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday!
A day off. Third in a row (well, sort of. Went in Saturday for a while, and will again later tonight for an hour). Days off have been rare lately. My main project today was transplanting a mature agave attenuata from the south utility walkway where it had grown large enough to get in the way of wheeling out the trash bin. It went west (left) of an existing one just outside the front room's sliding glass door. It had lots of little baby plants easily detachable from its lower trunk (complete with thier own sets of outreaching roots), so those went into the ground here and there inside the fence. Agave plantation!
A side project for today was removing the electronics housing from the solar photovoltaic powerplant. The new simplified system does away with the batteries, charger, and night-lighting inverter. The decision to make this simplification came when the 1300 watt PowerStar inverter died again during a rainstorm, and I learned that the U.S. company that makes (and repairs) them is dead too. So, as long as I live near an electric utility grid, the solar pv system will simply feed it as much as it can. Simple. If I ever move to somewhere off the grid, batteries will become part of the system again.
Yesterday I made a new rain-proof housing for the German brushless DC pump that circulates hot-tub water through the solar heat collector. The pump had failed after it received trauma and soaking, so it went back to Speck Pumpen for a new motor. Works fine again.
Now to go soak in some nuclear-fusion-heated water.
I woke up a little after 2 am this morning, and turned on the TV looking for the ESA press briefing, but couldn't find it on any of the cable channels. At noon we gathered at work to watch a videotape of it that David Coppedge had made, as well as the "CBS 60 Minutes" piece from Wednesday night. The Titan scientists had analysed enough of the Huygens data in the space of a week to determine with pretty good certainty:
Went to Pacific Sales in Burbank and bought a new refrigerator after leaving work early (vacation hours make an afternoon off). Don and I bought the old one in 1987. Its seals are leaking now, and it runs almost constantly. The new one is much more efficient with the power it consumes, and it has 8.5 cubic feet more capacity. Delivery will be next week. Stopped by Ikea to start planning the cabinets to surround the new fridge.
The icemaker has never been so productive. Its tray is just abounding with solid H2O. So I'm using it to fill up the cooler for tomorrow's food transfer, when the new Frigidaire arrives. My lament at breakfast with Mitch and Kathy was that this perfectly good icemaker, that I've allowed myself to form such an attachment to, is facing its demise. Originally, I argued not to include one when Donald and I purchased it 18 years ago. It's provided us enormous pleasure over the years, and I'm glad his argument was the winner. Bye-bye, good old (energy hungry, noisy, leaky, too deep-for-the-counter) 1987 fourteen cubic foot Frigidaire.
We executed OTM-12 last night. One little propulsive "Orbit Trim Maneuver" nudge three times per Saturn orbit. Last night's, the one near apoapse (ok, "apochron"), was on the 400-Newton hypergolic main engine, rather than 1-Newton thrusters. What an awesome rocket ship Tom Gavin built for Julie to fly, full of the scientists's experiments. Better'n any icemaker. Would have been better if it had a scan platform like Voyager's, but hey, it's doing fine.
I wonder how "W" is going to spin the Iraqui election, and how soon before results are confirmed.
Is Mamaliga Right for Me?About the dish:Name: Mamaliga (a.k.a. Cardiologist Special)Active Ingredients: cheddar cheese, jack cheese, sour cream, butter, salt Inactive Ingredients: water, corn meal Indications: This ostensibly Romanian dish is tasty, hearty, fattening and filling. A delicious addition to any plate. Caveat: Mamaliga is not for everyone. Gentlemen who do not exercise regularly are advised to consume mamaliga in modest quantities. Side effects include bloating, weight gain, heartburn, and hardening of the arteries. Clinically obese people should not ingest mamaliga. Call your cardiologist out of surgery on the weekend to ask if mamaliga is right for you. |
I've got a fever of 101 ° F., and a cough that has persisted for two days. I'm being a total vegetable today.
My 101 ° fever broke yesterday and I went to work this morning to pick up the pieces I had let go of for most of the week. I've never seen so much SPAM.
Came home early (I'm charging the whole week to "sick time" since the timekeeping system rejects any attempts to charge less than 8-hour increments). I'm beginning to get some of my energy back, and it feels great. While doing a little light pruning and raking here and there, I noticed that the Boston Ivy, for which I built the perimeter fence, has indeed sprouted its first few leaves of the season. Last season the three individual plants had achieved their assigned full coverage of the fence. This season I hope to watch it fill out some more. I love its habits: it climbs ONLY the fence, and does not creep across the ground, or try to sneak up into a tree. It holds its leaves neatly parallel to one another. It turns pretty colors in the fall, after setting little grape-like fruit that the birds like. College educated ivy!
So, North Korea has blatently announced having some nuclear devices "to defend against a newly hostile United States." I swear to Jupiter and Saturn, I wish my country were peace-loving, and a better citizen of this little blue world by orders of magnitude. It hasn't always been like this. We didn't have to invade Iraq, and we surely don't need to have one foot, and rattling saber, in Iran.
Jane Mayer's article in this week's New Yorker, Outsorcing Torture, describes how our country's administration is splitting legal hairs to permit "almost torturing" detainees as well as rendering them to other countries to do the complete job for us, so that the CIA and the military can obtain intelligence and confessions under force.
Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, told Mayer that "the U.S. accepts quite a lot of intelligence from the Uzbeks" extracted from detainees who have been tortured. This information was, he said, "largely rubbish." In Uzbekistan, he said, "partial boiling of a hand or an arm is quite common" for extracting intelligence and confessions. He knew of two cases in which prisoners had been boiled to death.
Former British intelligence officer Tom Parker is quoted, "The U.S. is doing what the British did in the 1970s, detaining people and violating their civil rights. It did nothing but exacerbate the situation. Most of those interned went back to terrorism. You'll end up radicalizing the entire population."
I am outraged by my country's behavior. This brutality is abhorrent, it produces garbage for intelligence, and it is not the way of a civilized nation. There are effective, humane, ways of obtaining credible intelligence. Instead of conducting as much torture and "rendering" as Alberto Gonzales and his associates have convinced Bush the law allows, our actions should be a shining example of respect for detainees' rights in the world. But our ham-handed administration prefers to squander any such possibility.
Bush thinks he has a mandate to brutalize and humiliate detainees, instead of honoring their human rights and upholding the Geneva Conventions. John C. Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general, argued, "BushÕs victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was proof that the debate is over." He said, "The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum."
I say this is not acceptable. Taft is right.
Went out in the rain the other day to get new prayer flags from the Tibetan shop in Old Town. The ones that had been hanging on my architectural experiment in the Oak Room had faded and partially disintegrated over the last year or two.
I don't understand what's written on them. But that's ok, I love and trust Tibetan Buddhism. After in mantra yoga initiation from John Blofeld in the early 1970s, I recall a pleasant dinner, eaten in typical silence, with him, Tarthang Tulku, and ten other folks at Nyingma. I recall from their lore that there are beings living in the hells (not as much physical places, but more a characterization of the state of affairs they are enduring in their lives). Similarly there were beings in better and better conditions, including mine and yours. Visualizations were employed that sent light of different colors to the different beings: the Red Light of Discriminating Wisdom to the ones in the hells, Harmonious Golden Light to the next bunch, and so up to the different bunches o' beings (realms, or Samsaras) with All-accomplishing Green Light, then Mirror-like Blue Light, and lastly Brilliant White Light to the highest.
So that's what colors the flags are.
But I'm not a Buddhist, or anything.
The Ace just called. Cassini's SSPS, the solid-state power switch that controls the electrical power distribution throughout the spacecraft had a switch unexpectedly change states from off to reset. The Ace said everything is fine, he had contacted all the required people, and the on-board software cleaned up the reset.
Good spacecraft.
Hans Bethe is dead, at 98 years old. In 1939 he described the "carbon cycle" that accounts for thermonuclear processes in stars heavier than the Sun, and received the Nobel Prize for it in 1967.
I'm honored to have been alive during some of the years this physicist breathed the air. The news media around here is pronouncing his name "Bay-ta," as in "Beta Max."
On the way home from Burbank, I happened to hear an interview on KPFK with Leonard Jacobson that struck a nice chord. Says he, "The illusion that we need to awaken from is the world of the thinking mind, which includes all our spiritual knowledge and concepts... The tree or the flower in front of you has more power to bring you present than all the books in the world and all the teachers who have ever existed. All you have to do is bring yourself present with that which is present."
(Siddhartha twirled a flower, Mahakasyapa smiled.)
Mitch got his "licence to save" (EMT) Wednesday.
