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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Wednesday July 6, 2005Wow, that was pretty spectacular. I was at home, watching lots of familiar faces on CNN. Several key Cassini people had been "borrowed" to put together and fly that thing. I'm happy they actually pulled it off!All along, I was afraid they were going to miss the comet, what with the very complicated auto-navigation software on the impactor that had to interpret what it saw, figure out how to correct its impact trajectory, and fire its own thrusters only a short time before hitting... no time for any intervention from here. The TV and newspaper images all showed activity from the first floor of the building I work in. We had a Cassini track going on at the time, and the Cassini Ace was working on the third floor. When missions have important events like this one, they lock the back doors to the building (where it's most convenient for the Cassini Ace to come and go, or to get a fresh-air break on the balcony), so he had to come in through the main lobby downstairs right near all the excitement. And near the food. Caltech catering offered everybody in the building a box lunch/dinner! I was sort of disappointed when the LA Times didn't have a word about it yesterday morning. I guess 11 pm Sunday was past their press time. Their front page the next day had a good spread on it, though. The image isn't a simulation. It's what the flyby spacecraft saw a minute after impact, and what earthlings saw in their telescopes though much less resolved. The 800-pound copper mass heated and vaporized along with comet material when it hit at about 23,000 mph.
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Thursday July 7, 2005
Another blowup in London. How, and when, is peace going to be achieved on this polarized planet? Maybe if we ever get beyond polarization. Them and us. With us or against us. And look at this tiny, watery lifeboat we inhabit together for cryin' out loud! Thinking of last weekend's activities, that DI Impactor poses an interesting analogy, at least part of its mission does. The analogy is where it has to come alive, look around at its surroundings, figure it all out, and take proper actions to fulfill its objective. And it's a pretty complex environment it has to figure out, and a tightly constrained timeframe in which to do it. And hey, imagine! This mission, DI, cost only as much as making a bigtime summer movie! Pretty good return on the science bucks, in my humble opinion. But the analogy is with us, of course. We come alive wide awake into an environment that we have to figure out pretty rapidly, and take a trillion appropriate actions, in order to reach fulfillment. Hey, even to survive. It's hard to figure out, in varying measures according to family circumstances, from abject poverty in famine, to enlightened companions with at least meager means of support, and everywhere in between and beyond. It's easy to screw up in a billion different ways, and it's easy to get lost in it all, and end up bulldozing right over subtle truth, maybe precisely just because it's so simple.
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Sunday July 17, 2005
The marine layer is still a major influence, what with all the haze, but the sun has been nice and strong all day. "Yes, We're Open!" On hot days like this, Mitch prefers to close all the energy-efficient windows and the doors (three of the five doors are not very energy-efficient), resulting in a nice cool place. But Mitch is working all day today, and I've got every conceivable portal open to the warm breeze. An air conditioner is coming, though, I've started calling contractors. I still do maintain my "don't-need-no-air-conditioning" opinion. But central heating & air conditioning will be necessary if I decide next year to sell the place. It can certainly be a small one, considering how cool the place can remain when closed up, without one. The photovoltaic station kicked offline this morning, so the meter was not running backwards, even though it's sunny. I measured the voltage on the grid at 132 volts per leg, much too high. So I called Edison and they got the regulation back under control by 12:30. The meter is now going in the preferred direction despite ceiling fans, fridge, and computer. Saturn is going behind the sun now, as viewed from Earth. It's about 4.5 degrees east of it, and will pass close by next week, to become a morning object. The sun's noise at X-band frequency, and the fact that Saturn is most distant from us these days, means only limited commanding and low-rate downlink. Cassini will be commanded in a few days to just stare at earth sending only 1896 bits of telemetry data per second, and we'll lose some of that when the system-noise temperature gets too high. Conjunction blues! But Radio Science will be taking the opportunity to observe the solar corona, so not all science is lost. Yesterday Bob Mitchell, our Program Manager, had the flight team over for beer, BBQ, and entertainment, in celebration of our first year in Saturn orbit. (The linked image shows him, seated, basking in the success of the Saturn Orbit Insertion maneuver, July 1 GMT last year.) What a pleasure, an honor really, to have even a small part in this awesome team! Bob's house sports a stained-glass Saturn window, and a rusty iron Saturnian fencepost cap. I drove there in my Saturn. We all love our work.
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Sunday July 24, 2005
Happiness is a new pair of clogs and a new mat outside my cell. | ||
Thursday July 28, 2005Not a single car passed me, or vice-versa, this morning on my 1-mile commute to work. Rush-hour traffic at 7:15am was a wittle wabbit with white fwuffy tail running ahead on the rocky bike path. He took the next exit. Well, and there was this newly-fallen 150 kilogram bolder parked right in the middle. It was negotiable.
But Tuesday, 7:15am found me parked in the middle of the 105 Freeway, or
Great Space Science class. Dozens of elementary school kids had elected to attend a summer program. The teacher was a highly skilled and highly motivated woman who had attended the educators' conference last time at JPL. I gave them a talk for an hour, then gave them two different projects in two groups. One task related to the previous hour's slides, the other one would be illustrated in the next hour's picture show. All the kids were certainly very bright, and eagerly motivated to learn. The activities worked pretty well, and the groups presented their findings to each other. The only glitch was that the one drop of homogenized milk they needed had curdled in my car enroute. Its suspended globules had grown well out of the 1-micron-ish bounds for doing a very effective "forward-scattered light" demo. I wouldn't have had the pleasure of meeting those eager kids and their great teachers, had our fourth Ace not been dealt his layoff two whole weeks earlier than we had expected. Maybe Tibi would have used a drop of fresh milk! | ||
Saturn's Day July 30, 2005
In a few days, there is going to be one final event in the history of science. The final spacecraft diametric occultation of Saturn's rings, Saturn's atmosphere, and rings again, will occur Tuesday morning. Pure, loud, phase-coherent tones of radio downlink at S-Band, X-Band, and Ka-band will actively probe Saturn one last time. The received signals (at several polarizations) will be stored for posterity, having captured every effect the Saturnian system could imprint (attenuation, scintillation, polarization, scatter, frequencies, phases, and the like). No further such experiments are planned by any spacecraft now flying, or currently on the books for launch. This is it! Cassini's occultation data will then serve to supply many generations of scientists, young and old, opportunities for discovery of Nature's laws and phenomena.
After Tuesday's occultation, Cassini's orbital parameters will not favor Radio Science like they have this "season." Their inclination and period will be adjusted to favor some other scientific discipline. Yesterday's eleven-a.m. meeting with the Radio Scientists and the Deep Space Network experts ironed out all the detailed technical plans to ensure the best chances of success in capturing the data this one last time. The largest stations in Madrid, Spain, will be pointing precisely for over ten hours, and observing the Saturn occultation for seven and a half hours, high in their daytime summer sky. Hey, the meeting was over in less than 40 minutes! It's been a month now since the Irish Consulate said they were getting to applications submitted in January 2005. Maybe next month they will get to the ones my sister and I mailed last March. Our father was born a citizen of the Irish Republic, and we applied to have our Irish citizenship acknowledged. | ||
Sunday July 31, 2005
Yesterday, and again today, thunderstorms in the high deserts have been visible from here. This image shows the top of one beginning to grow, with the first, and smaller, of the two San Gabriel Mountain ranges in the foreground. The storm is actually brewing past the second range, invisible from here because we're too close to (within, really) the front range. That higher range includes Mt. Wilson, Mt. Baden-Powell, etc. All down to the east you can see them developing, maturing, and dissipating.
I love watching T-storms grow... Moist marine air being pumped in from offshore... It hits the mountain range and lifts... As the pressure decreases, the moisture condenses out... The act of condensing releases heat, and that helps it rise further into still lower pressure, condensing, heating, rising more... Boom! Laws of physics at play. The internet has really become a cool resource for everything. The same clouds are also visible in the Mt. Wilson Camera at the moment (although the higher parts of that T-storm are off camera to the right in that captured image).
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Thursday August 4, 2005
Took today off work, a day of "vacation." The electrician and his helper arrived at 8:30 and started by disconnecting the 100-amp electrical service from the utility pole. Even though Victor doesn't know it yet, I am, ahem, borrowing some electricity from him. I left a note where the extension cord plugs into his exterior outlet next door. I unplugged the fridge just now, so I can run the computer for a few minutes.
Thanks, Victor, I owe you a beer. The new electric meter panel will have an actual "main breaker" service shutoff, and it will be roomy enough for me to add circuit breakers for a mini-split ductless air conditioning system before summer's out. Not so much for immediate comfort, although there will be days... but more to add to the house's marketability down the road. But first I'll have to tend to the roof, after the electrician is done this afternoon, and waterproof the new riser before the LA County inspector comes tomorrow. I expect the new meter will run backwards just as readily. But the Solar System can't feed the grid, or the house, while we're disconnected.
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Saturday August 6, 2005Four electricians were working on the new service panel until 9pm Thursday night. Or, it was probably more like one electrician for a little while late in the job, and a journeyman, an apprentice, and a general helper the rest of the day. Then by midnight, I finished sealing off the roof where the new riser comes in. The electricians had trampled the steel blue Decra tile roof as badly as they had trampled the newly-flowering sedum bed. Oh well, half of that raised planter-bed will have to go anyway, to provide 36 inches of clearance from the electrical service panel for LA County code. Unless the inspector who comes out on Monday is overly kind and merciful. Hey, it's only 18 inches high.Other than the clearance infraction, the rest looks like it is up to code and should pass easily. They sank two new eight-foot long grounding rods about 12 feet apart into the rocky San Gabriel Mountain alluvium, by attaching them to an electric, hand-held hefty hammer-drill. That was after the guy in the picture above "discovered" that it was rocky soil with his two kilogram hammer. There's the copper-clad grounding rod that he had just driven halfway in before giving up. And they bonded the gas pipes to the water pipes. Finally, they ran yet another ground connection 30 feet to the main water entrance. All the ground connections are fat stranded copper, armored in that steel jacket we used to call BX. The worst part was that after it was done, neither Mitch nor I noticed that the meter was running the wrong way. I had forgotten to switch the Solar System back on, and we missed an entire sunny day of grid-feeding. See that yellow tag in the photo above? It's the SCE "net metering agreement" tag. That shutoff I had remembered to turn back on, but I had forgotten that I had ALSO shut off the DC to the grid-tie inverter out in the back yard. Maybe I just didn't want to look at it at all yesterday, Friday, the "morning after." But today I'll start cleaning up around the area, dressing the trampled communications wires, and painting some spots. Oh, yes, the meter IS going the "right" way now: feeding the grid on a sunny day! | ||
Sunday August 7, 2005It's Sunday, so I can wax spiritual, right?I've been watching this cumulonimbus grow for the past few hours, as I spend a busy, productive, but otherwise largely meditative and silent day. And the air is silent more often than not today. I can hear the thunderstorm off in the distance, even though it's on the order of ten kilometers away, to the north-northeast. Its upper reaches are getting into the icy zones, probably ten km altitude. It's stunning. One of these knocked out communications with Cassini yesterday. Not from any lightning strike, but just because the high noise temperature of all that water drowned out (ahem) the tiny distant X-band radio signal from Deep Space Station 15 at Goldstone, a 34-meter aperture trained on Saturn. Ok, I posted a warning. Here's the mushy part: This is our Mother the Earth producing fresh, pure water. The Water of Life without which we would not exist here. There. | ||
Wednesday August 10, 2005"Arrogance" is how Pam characterized it tonight at dinner. W's handlers propped him up at the solar test facility at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. There he is, with Lab Director Thomas Hunter, making believe the United States is finally going down the right track.The irony is exquisite: this sustainable-energy facility was established in 1976 in response to the "energy crisis" that SHOULD have set the nation on a course to shake its addiction to oil, especially the foreign oil that W so loves to go to war about. It should have taken us those twenty-nine years to realize complete energy independence. The truth is different. W's energy bill hands out massive incentives to the oil industry (surprise!), the "noook-u-lar" industry (which has never broken even, and which will ensure additional dangerous materials will be available for potential terrorist activities), and to "clean coal" which W is on record saying will not contribute any greenhouse gases. Yeah. I guess he's going to clean out all the carbon from it. No stricter new mileage standards for the transportation industry. No real commitment to renewable resources. No pollution relief. Nothing but greater addiction to a fossil fuel economy, and handouts for his favorite corporations. Image shamelessly stolen from today's USA Today.
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Saturday September 3, 2005Haven't felt much like blogging lately.I'm entirely disappointed, disheartened, to see how my government has failed to be quick to provide basic domestic disaster relief. This, and basic medical services and coverage, is precisely what government is for. Government is NOT for collecting taxes to pay the churches. It is not for grossly subsidizing the fossil-fuel industries at the expense of renewable energy policy and infrastructure. People do not need their governments to start up arrogant wars based on trumped-up thinly concealed lies. The U.S. administration is squandering horrendous amounts of resources on ill-begotten war-entanglement, tax cuts, and corporate handouts, while mostly neglecting any and all real responsibility. Sixteen day orbits around Saturn, three rocket engine burns each orbit. Plus lots of good Radio Science experiments. For my team this means preparing and watching the realtime tracking like a hawk, making sure to do everything possible to ensure that Nav gets their data... that Radio Science gets their data... that Imaging and the other experiments all get their data... that thousands of commands all get registered on board... no matter what time of day or night here on Earth. Katrina served as a test. We failed. We are not anywhere near ready to react appropriately or effectively to the next disaster, whether a pandemic of human-to-human communicable influenza, or a nuclear detonation in one or more of our ports. We're wide open. Utterly unprepared. But hey, think of all the families this administration is trying to protect from gay marriage! Here's an actual quote from the U.S. President: "The good news," said W, "is that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubble of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's gong to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." Yes, W, Fantastic. | ||
Sunday September 4, 2005How many more wake-up calls are we going to get? I heartily believe the number is vanishingly small. We must take enormous political action to turn this W-baby around. We need to be solidly on the course of a solar-based economy, not a dead-ended fossil-fuel based economy. This is imperative. We'll have a little indication of its importance once the prices at the fossil-pump feel the relatively tiny loss of fossil supplies and processing capability resulting from Katrina.We needed to get firmly on a solar-based course thirty years ago. Regardless of reality, I fully expect W's response to focus right in on fixing up and supplying the oil corporations needs far in advance of adequately addressing the poor, impoverished, LA residents' horrible plight. Watch. I think I'm going to repeat myself again now: We need to be solidly on the course of a solar-based economy, not this dirty, dead-ended fossil-based economy.Ok? It's not sustainable. And it's not just the local ecological messes it keeps making. It noticeably contributes to the worsening of the whole planet's climate.There is a fine alternative solar-based economy waiting in the wings for the director's cue. But the director is sound asleep.
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Thursday September 8, 2005I heard Mitch in the kitchen squeezing juice out of oranges, it must have been around 6:30 in the morning. So it was no surprise to hear him strike the wind chime calling me for a little informal zazen on the north porch. Zazen with fresh orange juice, sans mudra, sans posture, but importantly, sans thought. Just sitting.I cycled down the hill at 7:30 looking forward to a whole day without any meetings, maybe to get a lot of work done. But it looked like some data was missing from the previous DSN pass... this was the first downlink after the T-7 Titan flyby at 1,000 km altitude. Radar had taken the third synthetic aperture imaging swath across the surface, and was boasting they'd find a lake. I called my team member who manages data accountability. He said it did not come down from the spacecraft. Anomaly meetings all day. The last one let out at 10:30 pm. One of the solid-state recorders on the spacecraft had jammed (logically; there are no moving parts). Lost half the data from T7, including most of the radar imaging. Mitch called me about 9:30 pm to let me know it was dark outside. Yeah, so what? OH!!! I had cycled in that morning, and there are no lights on the bike! He offered me a ride home. | ||
Monday September 12, 2005Air conditioner landed in good shape 5:00 pm on an 11am-to-3pm delivery appointment. The SEKO Worldwide driver arrived in a Budget Rent-a-Truck without a power lift on the tailgate. He mentioned that the electrical power was out all along his route here from LAX, making each traffic light become in effect a stop sign.This thing is a Japanese-designed Fujitsu ductless split-mini tri-zone unit made in Thailand. Shipping its 450-pound mass from New Jersey cost me $99. Its efficiency rates slightly better than the minimum allowed. Air conditioning is mostly wasteful of Earth's resources. I haven't been eager to have it here at home because there are only two weeks per year a little hotter than perfectly comfortable. It will cause lots of CO2 to enter the atmosphere over its lifetime. But this system will enable the house to sell if I decide to put it on the market in a year or two.
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Saturday September 17, 2005
I walked to Starbucks for coffee and croissant, then back to the room to run through a quick review of my two-hour Powerpoint show. At 10 am I checked out of the room, then went to the conference room to give my talk. The Ham Convention audience was great. Inquisitive. Technically savvy. Friendly, casual. I loved talking to them about Cassini and Huygens, and they enjoyed it. Plus the host gave me a really nice 100% cotton XL HamConVention logo'd polo shirt. I will enjoy it greatly. Thank you, thank you! At noon when it was over, I drove to the Forestiere Underground Gardens as Mitch had suggested I do. The sign said "Next tour at 2 pm." so I went to a Thai restaurant and had a long lunch while reading my monthly magazine from Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The gardens are a sight to be seen. Sicilian immigrant Baldasare Forestiere spent forty years in the early 1900s manually digging into the natural cement hardpan* layer in the San Joaquin valley sediment, creating underground rooms and gardens with skylights through which citrus trees reached up to the sun. The place is cool on a hot day, and serene. I admire Forestiere's creativity and persistence. And his ability to disregard convention and go his own way, when and where it was appropriate. He got to the root of his problem of growing fruit trees, while making a nice, naturally cooled and heated home for himself.
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Thursday September 22, 2005The Church would be irrelevant but for all its unfortunately effective, backwards social influences, at a time when progress is most needed. Pope Benedict XVI is about to approve an Instruction that gay men should not be ordained as Roman Catholic priests. The document calls on bishops to bar even celibate gay men from seminaries and comes as the Roman Catholic Church in the United States is about to begin Vatican-ordered inspections of its 229 seminaries, looking for, among other issues, "evidence of homosexuality.""While he's at it, [the Pope] should order that the Sistine Chapel be painted over and that the Vatican get rid of all the sacred works of art created for it by so-called 'disordered' gay people over the centuries. ... This is part of the church hierarchy's campaign to scapegoat gay people for the decades of appalling [pederast-priests'] sex abuse of children and young people that it alone... nurtured and covered up. This smokescreen will never hide the reality that the abject, willful negligence of the hierarchy resulted not only in thousands of victims but in essentially squandering nearly $1 billion donated by parishioners to pay damages to those victims." -- Matt Foreman of The Task Force The poster at right was the brainchild of Father Jonathan Meyer, depicted, associate director of youth and young adult ministry for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. The poster, which is modeled after an advertisement for the movie "The Matrix," was designed by Missy Scarlet, a graphic designer and friend of Father Meyer. (Catholic News Service photo.) | ||
Wednesday September 28, 2005Took a day of vacation today to stay home while the air conditioning installer hooked up the system. I had mounted the outdoor unit and the three indoor units, and Friday finished hooking up the electrical connections and buttoning up the conduits. Robert form "Thermal Air" showed up right on time at 9am and proceeded to run insulated copper tubing between the compressor outside the north wall, and each of the indoor evaporator-fan units. The longest run was 50 feet through the attic to the 12,000 BTU/hr unit in the office. The one in the kitchen is 18,000 BTU/hr, and the one in the apartment is another 12,000. Right after he left I discovered he had hooked up the 18 to a 12 port on the compressor. He came back at 6pm and corrected it.I participated in a command approval meeting from home, to replay some Hyperion data we lost yesterday from the spacecraft.
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Fly this on your website. |
inching toward Manhattan Beach. Got me to Pacific School about right on time at 8:50, though I had been hoping to have time for a leisurely breakfast before the show. I love my regular commute. I wouldn't do very well at all with a long one in the LA area. Traffic in the beach communities has reached about 350% of capacity, and the freeways aren't much better.
