This is a realtime "weblog" of what's going on in my life right now. I'll update it occasionally. Many of the space flight ops abbreviations I use can be found here. Spelling doesn't always get checked or corrected. Dates and times are all Pacific Time. Thanks for reading !
Dave
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Saturnday March 19, 2005The Orbit Trim Maneuver (OTM) at apoapsis of Saturn orbit #4 is today, at which time we begin Orbit #5. The Ace would have called me if there had been any problems in realtime.Started a new I-Blog page because the simple text editor refused to add any more characters to the old file. Saturnday March 26, 2005The Titan Approach Orbit Trim Maneuver (OTM) for tomorrow, with meetings today, was cancelled yesterday afternoon when it was made clear it would only have to result in a 3 mm/second acceleration. In comparison, the residual acceleration from the Reaction Wheel Bias Update would be twice that much. Last OTM at apoapsis had gotten it all!Wednesday marked 36 years since Donald and I began our life together. Claudio and Shaun formally said "Thanks for the ride to Titan" yesterday with a wonderful lunch for Cassini in Von Karman. Everyone was there. "You're welcome, very welcome, and thank you for the opportunity!" I say to the Huygens bunch, and, of course, "Congratulations on your awesome success!!!" |
Easter Sunday March 27, 2005We're celebrating the color yellow in the gardens.
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Friday April 1, 2005T-4.Titan close targeted flyby number four. Cassini took another SAR noodle (radar image of a strip of surface) for a total now of three. And all the TLM seems to be coming down ok. Last time we had "63," the 70-meter aperture tracking station at Madrid, there was a problem in its Uplink Local Oscillator that we didn't know about until RTLT later. Lost tons of data including Titan approach images, spectra, etc., and Doppler for measuring Titan's gravitational mass (GM). But today's a good day. E-mailed Keris the agenda for the Cassini part of Caltech Prefrosh Week. This is going to be fun. Brilliant young students are my favorite kind of audience! Amanda, Rosaly, and I will give 'em a real good 2-hour show.
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Sunday April 10, 2005Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Dead pope.
Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Dead pope. Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Dead pope. Dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope, dead pope. Good pope. Nice pope.
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Saturnday April 16, 2005
Titan-5 close flyby today, 1025 km altitude. No tracking till tomorrow, so no calls from the Ace. Had a couple of problems last night, though, and the had Ace called to tell me about a command he sent for MIMI that didn't get in. That's unusual, so I told him to let the Spacecraft Office Manager know. At 11:30 pm. Earlier, INMS took a reset. The INMS folks thought they had fixed that on-board software bug, and even announced the assumed success to the whole project at Tuesday morning's meeting.
Mitch is off to the Getty Museum, and I had fun preaching about Cassini, Huygens, Saturn and Titan with Amanda and Rosaly, down on the campus to 350 visiting prospective undergrads and their guests. We joined them all for lunch on the lawn beforehand, with tables and chairs under a huge tent - I was expecting box lunches and grass stains. Nice bunch of students, pretty good Q&A. Two hours is a pretty long session, though, and they were quickly gone when it was over. Our host presented us with gift certificates from the Ath (woo-hoo! Thank you Keris!), and other nice tokens. Mine was a copy of Rosaly's new book, which she signed for me along with several other copies people had bought in the lobby. Microsoft failed me, though. My movies in Powerpoint wouldn't run on the PC-laptop hooked up to the projector, so I arm-waved instead. I REALLY should have brought in the Mac Powerbook from my car. Lesson learned. Besides, what fun is software that doesn't put up a good fight?
Sunday April 17, 2005One month since Beah and I signed and sent in our applications for Irish citizenship. The consulate said it will take eight months to process.The Caltech prefrosh visiting Pasadena this weekend saw some hazy marine layer that is typical of summer weather here. I wonder if many of them understood the difference between this natural ocean haze layer and smog. It's too easy to notice the impaired visibility and write it off as "the LA smog." A couple years ago, I did a presentation for some students working at JPL for the summer, on factors affecting the local climate. The slides are here, but they only list topics that I elaborated on in the presentation. It might be of some use anyway; I think it illustrates the basic point. |
Sunday April 24, 2005That was a quick week.Seems the Catholic Church has been the Top Story again, with... New pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope. Oh, my goodness, what will the new pope do? Oh, my goodness, what will the new pope do? Oh, my goodness, what will the new pope do? Oh, my goodness, what will the new pope do? Oh, my goodness, what will the new pope do? Oh, my goodness, what will the new pope do? Oh, my goodness, what will the new pope do? Oh, my goodness, what will the new pope do? Oh, my goodness, what will the new pope do? Oh, my goodness, what will the new pope do? New pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope, new pope. Even on Meet the Press! News coverage has all but excluded the "energy" bill moving through Congress that forces massive continuation of emphasis on the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. Wrong direction to go. Wrong, wrong, wrong. What we need for many reasons right now is better transportation mileage mandates, empowering distributed-generation of electrical power from renewable sources, and laying off the campaign to open up ecological "reserves" and other sensitive areas to drilling and exploring for more "energy." These industries own the Bush Administration and friends, just in case you haven't noticed.
And nuclear energy is NOT clean like the Administration insists it is. It creates horrendous messes for many future generations to have to deal with, and that in a world socio-political climate that is becoming "hotter" and increasingly dangerous.
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Saturday May 7, 2005Monday night, Radio Science collected just about all the data they had set out to. Planning started more than eight years ago to get this occultation: an awesome, nearly diametric crossing behind Saturn and its rings whilest whistling a pure tone at 8.7 thousand megaHertz AND at phase-coherent (harmonic) frequencies around 2 GHz and 34 GHz. They recorded it all so it can be sifted through forever.Leonard Jacobson was interesting in his one-man play last weekend, "The True Passion of Christ." He said he just HAD to come out with this after he had seen some of Mel Gibson's recent work, The Passion of Christ." He basically played JC commenting on how his words 2K years ago had been sooooo misinterpreted, especially to wit all the wars fought in the name of religion. (From the Latin, "re-ligio", meaning "re-linking.") Aparantly, Leonard sincerely wants us to wake from the mind's dreamings and re-link to the real, and urgently now that we've got nuclear weapons and are about to go throwing them around our perfectly good blue planet. I set some criteria for myself to parse what he would say. He met most of them.
Tonight is the fundraiser for the Altadena Foothills Conservancy.
Sunday May 8, 2005No calls from the Ace. That's a good sign.Last night's AFC fundraising event was fun, and I avoided spilling wine or smearing brie on Mitch's jacket. The assembled Voyager model in a display case that I brought to the auction went for two hundred bucks! I'm so pleased I could squit! I finally finished reading Sherwin B. Nuland's little account of Leonardo Da Vinci last night. What a great read. Thanks, Bridget! True genius Leonardo could hardly ever finish anything, or collect his writings. My gut feel is that he always felt, "I'm not finished yet, I'll do that part of it later. When I have finished fully exploring it."
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Monday May 16, 2005Had to cancel out of my shift at JPL Open House yesterday because I woke up with a sore throat and a nasty cough that sounds just like the cough that my colleague has. Her desk is just down the hall from my office, and for the past two weeks, I've been hearing her deep, wrenching cough all day long... when she wasn't standing out on the porch having a cig, that is.So this morning, I went in and published my Monday Morning report (we had 13 DSN tracking passes supporting Cassini last week, with only two minor problems), then I went home.
On Saturday afternoon, I went to Coldwater Canyon Park, where my friend Jeff and his new wife Rachel had a gathering near Jeff's employer, Tree People, to celebrate their marriage a few weeks ago up in Mendocino County. Good to see Jeff again, and to meet Rachel. Well, if the oven represents a huge draw of electric power, another product also arrived on Saturday, that might help balance the load. I have been searching for light bulbs that use LEDs (light emitting diodes) and which simply screw into an AC light socket. I have made several from scratch, soldering full-wave bridge rectifiers, fat resistors, and handfuls of "super-bright" LEDs in series. They work nicely in the fence-exterior landscape lighting fixtures, using only 1/3 of the power, and lasting maybe 100 times as long, as incandescent lightbulbs. I had found this promising product at Sundance Solar, and thought it might be a good replacement for all six of the existing porch lights. The existing porchlight bulbs draw 15W. the LED bulb's specs say it draws only 2 watts, and its description sounds like it should be bright enough to serve as a porch light, and warm enough in color. I hope to be ordering some more of these... and decreasing the nightly porch light draw from 90W to 12W. We'll see. It didn't illuminate in any of the four sockets I tested it in. Sundance is sending a new one, and I put the dead one back in the mail to them today. The package says this product was made in China, and patents are held in China and Japan. Look, here's yet another industry the U.S. is ignoring in its push to remain solidly addicted to its dead-ended fossil-fueled heavy-consumption energy policy. Don't even think about conserving, say the conservatives in power.
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Saturday May 28, 2005Call from the Ace; at least he waited till ater 7am. INMS inamess again, took another reset, but will wait till next week to figure out what to do. The spacecraft is out by apoapsis, far from targets of interest to the good mass spectrometer people, and it's moving slowly. That makes for a good 3-day weekend. Except that we have to "ignore" a red alarm in telemetry for a few days. Alarms shouldn't be "gotten used to." But I won't make my team be the "bad guy" by requiring the INMS team to send in an alarm change before Tuesday.Hey, I met the new NASA Administrator Mike Griffin Wednesday, when he and Elachi plus entourage visited Cassini realtime operations. Nathan's new files on the Satellite Operations Analysis Program (SOAP) were a hit. Been struggling with the SA's at SCI's server farm. My commercial websites have been down since April 30, just because (a) I had to drop everything and redesign all the forms because, immediately after assuring me the forms' "engine" script would remain supported for years, they summarily yanked it without telling me, and (b) the SA's at HostCentric or Web2010, or ClientCentric, or whatever its latest name is, were taking 24 hours to answer each of several technical and administrative questions. Sheesh. But I think I'll have them up and running again later today. Or tomorrow. The line from Frank Herbert's Dune (the short movie version) that I watched on TV again the other night, has been bobbing around in the ol' mental aparatus, Muadib's words:
...especially notable since seeing Leonard Jacobson's play (see May 7 above).
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Sunday June 6, 2005I gave a namaste and a seashell to Leonard Jacobson yesterday, having spent most of a nice marine-layer Saturday with him. Indoors, though. A good visit amid a bunch of 50 others, served as sort of a personal trajectory-correction maneuver for me.Mitch's garden is growing marvelous things. Tomatoes, radishes, cilantro, bok-choy, I think. Other stuff too.
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Friday June 10, 2005Yesterday, I spent lunchtime sitting with a few ol' Voyager colleagues in the front of Von Karman auditorium listening to Ed Stone describe Voyager-1's passage through the Sun's termination shock. To describe the termination shock, where the solar wind goes subsonic out around 90 AU, he used the analogy of water running from a faucet, and hitting the sink. It spreads out in more or less a circular pattern, moving fast and creating a thin sheet, until it all bunches up at a more or less circular shock, where the water is more dense, and flows around to the drain. He had some great time-lapses of the Sun's photosphere, and great data graphics and animations.I asked Ed Stone whether he thought NASA would really let the Voyager Project go down the drain to save a few bucks, as they had recently announced they were going to do. Ed said, basically, "No way!" He's hopeful we'll track Voyager-1 till at least 2020, in its new "heliosheath" environment, and track (the slower) Voyager-2 as it breaks through the same shock further south in just a few more years. Voyager-2's plasma spectrometer will be very useful in the 'sheath when it gets there. Voyager-1's, unfortunately, is burned out. He's a very happy scientist. Ed Stone has been making breakthrough solar-system discoveries with Voyager for many, many years. What an awesome project it is! Sunrise, the bimonthly magazine, arrived today. An annoying reminder occupied the back cover, a quote from Carl Jung: "Who looks outward is dreaming. Who looks inward awakens." Yeah, Jung knew. But it sure is comfy to snooze.
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Saturday June 18, 2005
Got a card in the mail from Caroline, a very good friend of Donald's and Bill's, who had run into the Almitra website. She mentions they "touched her life deeply." Yup, that would be typical of Donald, alright. I will email her as soon as I finish straightening out the email account later today. Found this picture in an album without any hint of when it was taken. That would be Caroline on the left, with her mother Lucy. It has to be over a decade ago. I had met them once (I think. Maybe just spoke on the phone), but Donald was always talking about them, and often talking on the phone to them. I fell out of touch with them after D&B's deaths.
Maybe Caroline will have a story or two she can email in, to share on the Almitra site. That would be fantastic. |
Sunday June 19, 2005
I was sitting in the oakroom a few minutes ago. Little birds, finches, along with what might be sparrows and some tinier birds, were noisy. Their main interest was the feeder hanging in about the center of the big main dome on the south side of the ancient oak. It had its biweekly filling yesterday. They were also noisily enjoying the birdbath on the north side of the house, flying between it and the oak.
Then I noticed them dissappear into perches on the oak's twigs, hard to spot in among the leafy parts of the tree. Some flew away to other trees. Absolute silence. Very pleasant, the silence, since at the time there were no leaf blowers or barking dogs. Just a quiet canyon with a breeze. A small raptor jetted through with the marine layer breeze behind him. He descended and entered the oak dome from the south, shooting past the feeder at close range, as if knowing exactly where he was going among all the complex limbs. In half a second he was diving in through the jacaranda and the big ash tree across the street to the north and gone. Silent and swift, for sure following a familiar route. It would seem that the small-bird "community," that is the prey, would gain a huge survival advantage if that "community" kept tabs of where each raptor in the area was at any given moment. I deeply wonder if all that "noise," that we humans call chirping and singing, in fact conveys information useful in real time among a family, or a community, of certain species of little birds. One could also imagine long-distance communication, relayed up or down their migration routes, about the abundance of favorite foods. And of course, as Douglas Adams assures us in Hitchhiker's Guide, "all about the weather." A few years ago I was sititng on the north deck reading, when suddenly a raptor (it was a fat red-tailed hawk) took down a crow that had perched on the fence behind me. The hawk slammed the crow to the ground beside a boulder a meter east of my feet, and proceeded to dismantle it. What a show! The whole "community" of crows was dive-bombing the raptor. Loud crow-yelling? Lots. For an hour.
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Monday June 20, 2005
Happy solstice. In a few hours.
The countdown is still on as of 5 pm local. The Planetary Society is getting ready to launch the world's first solar sail spacecraft. Years ago, they asked if I would volunteer to make them a scale model of the spacecraft. I did a "free-downloadable" one. Recently, they asked me to do the "Solar Sail Watch" website pages for them. It took a weekend to make, and several months for it to go online. I think all the bugs have now been worked out of that bunch of pages. Good luck, Cosmos-1!
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Thursday June 23, 2005
So sorry to hear of the apparent failure of Cosmos-1's launch vehicle.
This is such a risky business. But TPS and Cosmos Studios are bold, and they faced that risk squarely and full-knowing. I do know the pain, as well as the promise, that space flight contains, and feel for all my friends associated with the loss of such an historic mission. I stayed home this morning to meet the Pacific Service refrigerator repair person. His news was not encouraging. It seems late-model Frigidaire's basic icemaker design has flaws. I've got a lemon on my hands. Back to work about 3pm to catch up on everything and talk to the Aces. Venus is beautiful and bright, low in the western sky tonight. And sure enough, there's tiny but bright Mercury right beside it, in line with the sun. First time I've seen it this year. Saturn is barely detectable on the same line but up left from Venus, and Jupiter is way high, and in line of course. Finally, an evening sky full of planets again! So I stood there thinking, "My last spacecraft is there, on the surface on Venus, and my current spacecraft is right over there..." |
Saturnday June 25, 2005
My father's birthday. He frequently mentioned he would not live to see Cassini arrive at Saturn and go into orbit, and of course he was right. Saturn rose in the east a couple hours ago trailing the sun, and that means we've got work to do. One Ace is out on medical leave, and another is in a wedding today. The other is overdue for a day off. That leaves me at the Ace console all day, collecting a bucket of bits from Cassini. At the moment, 10 am PDT, the spacecraft is still oriented with its high-gain antenna off Earth point (as received on Earth, that is. Things "actually" happen an hour and twenty-three minutes earlier that far away), while its optical instruments finish collecting science data. In 20 minutes it will have completed its careful turn to point to Earth again, and is programmed step up its telemetry downlink rate to just over 110,000 bits per second. Later, as Saturn gets higher in the sky, it will step it up to 124k bps. Then as the spacecraft appears lower and lower in the sky, and its signal has to go through more of Earth's atmosphere before getting to the Deep Space Network antenna in the Mojave Desert, Cassini will step the data rate down again, going as low as 99kbps before the day is done. All nicely programmed months in advance. Choreographed would be a better word. I just finished giving the guys at the station (Deep Space Station 14, which is 70 meters in aperture) a briefing for today's activities, and they're configuring equipment and will start moving the Big Dish to point at Saturn in the daytime sky. They know exactly where it is. At 7:25 pm the spacecraft will turn away (as seen here on Earth) and start collecting more science data with its optical instruments, which it will send back early tomorrow morning. Then later tomorrow, there's another special occultation experiment. The spacecraft will once again pass behind Saturn and the rings as seen from Earth, and the Radio Scientists will record and examine the three pure radio tones coming down (telemetry is too noisy for them, so we turn it off) to study Saturn's rings and upper atmosphere. Yup, I'll be here till 7:30 pm today. It's a fine, mild and sunny Saturday in the foothills, and there are no windows in this building except the ones on the computers looking at data from our robot orbiting Saturn a billion miles away. Right now it's passing in front of the planet, in the process of whipping around close behind, before climbing, slowing, and reaching its orbital high point again on the fifth of July. The station just called (10:16 am). They have Cassini's carrier signal in lock! I told them not to bother locking telemetry until the high-rate, scheduled a few minutes from now. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Now it's 11:15 am. I've finished making all the technical log entries needed to document the start of today's tracking period. I sent a command to the spacecraft at 10:45. It will take two hours and forty-six minutes before I see whether the fine spacecraft has accepted and acted upon it. It always does. Good spacecraft. With any luck, it will be a quiet, boring type of day with no little surprises from any of the spacecraft's science instruments, and no little surprises from the Deep Sapce Network. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Having said that, the station just called (12:23 pm) to report they have lost visibility into the uplink that they're generating. So have I, on the repeated monitor displays. We can't see the state of the transmitter, nor can we see the range tones going out every 5 minutes, that measure distance to the spacecraft. I don't want to reset the uplink controller just to restore visibility of course, so we'll just wait for the spacecraft to tell us what it sees. Good spacecraft. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1:40 pm: I just saw telemetry indicating that the command I sent earlier was received and acted upon. It reset a fault-protection timer onboard that protects the spacecraft's ability to receive commands. In the picture above, the big dish in front is the 70-m Deep Space Station 14, which we're using today. In the background is the smaller DSS 15, which is 34 meters in diameter. We use it sometimes when we don't need a real high data rate. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 4 pm: Oh, well, I had hoped for a quiet track. Now the DSN antenna has halted, causing its receiver to drop Cassini's signal since the Earth's rotation quickly takes the antenna off point. And they are having trouble getting it to track again; the mammoth ancient structure keeps halting. Dunno why yet. But every second now, we're losing 110,601 bits of hard-won science data, gone forever.
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Sunday June 26, 2005I'm going to advocate not using the word "for" with the verb "to advocate." Yes, I am an advocate of that.Suddenly over the past year or so everwhere I see the verb "advocate" or hear it in the media, it has that unnecessary three-letter word attached to it. It's almost as annoying as multiple uses of "is." Like "What the problem is, is that there are too many words."
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Tuesday June 28, 2005I do not advocate rendition.Bush's war is absolutely crazy. We knew he was itching to have a war just like Daddy's from the minute he wiggled into that office. Libr'ls have documented it well. "W" and his True B'leevers are surprised it wasn't quick and clean like Daddy's Gulf War. But they'll never admit it. "I'm a War President" has made a total mockery of real American values, and we've naturally made a millionfold more enemies. We have got to turn this locomotive around and get Big Oil out of the way.
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Fly this on your website. |
Yes, yes, 
The oven arrived Saturday morning at 7:30. An electric Jennair purchased in March (Yes, electric. It makes the utility meter spin rapidly in the 
