Almitra

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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Friday September 30, 2005

The native people who lived here, in what we call the Los Angeles Basin, before Europeans arrived called this area "Valley of Smokes."

This time of year, a high pressure area centers itself several hundred miles to the northeast, churning coriolis-clockwise as air descends from the upper troposphere and spreads out. Santa Ana winds blow from the northeast, down the mountains, through the canyons, heating as they descend and pressurize. The result is extremely dry, hot, strong gusty winds. Everything is crispy. Walking on oak leaves makes them crackle into dust with a very crispy-crackly sound. The canyons especially are dry.

A cigarette tossed thoughtlessly out a car window, or a hot catalytic converter merely touching dry brush, can result in wildfire during a Santa Ana.

Sleeping is light. You have to constantly be sniffing the air to test for the scent of nearby fire storming down the canyon. This mesa hasn't burned for more than 60 years, so it is replete with fuel. Crispy fuel. But last night the smoke smell contained a tinge of "wet smoke" flavor, revealing that it was from fires that are miles away, being attacked by firefighters. Today the air is under the influence of the moist, cooler marine layer, rather than yesterday's Santa Ana foehn effect, so the danger is not quite as threatening.

Today I'm not worrying much. But I am checking our readiness to evacuate on short notice if it were to become necessary.

Had breakfast with Kathy and Mitch at 6:40 am down at Carrows. Kathy went to school to teach her "extra good class" of English students, Mitch went to work later, maybe moving patients from fire-threatened places (or at least ready to), and I went to my 8 am Cassini Status & Scope meeting. Apoapsis burn OTM-36 got cancelled, so there are no regularly scheduled meetings for this weekend. Lunch with Robert at 11:45, then I took the rest of the day off to burn 4 hours of vacation.

Awesome sunset. The western sky has lots of smoke particles mixing into high stratus and altocumulus. Venus is a Beacon of Beauty.

Thursday October 6, 2005

I was late to my command approval meeting this morning. I had just lost track of time, when my pager went off and sent me running to the second-floor conference room.

Later, I was admiring this huge "Teacher Training" banner that was set up outside the third-floor conference room, when Alice said that Ed Stone was going to be presenting to the dozen professional educators at 11 am, why don't I drop by and listen in? I did. He gave an awesome account of his Voyager Mission discoveries, and current activities in the solar-wind termination shock. Afterwards, I was talking with the Ace when Dr. Stone approached the elevator, and I asked him whether he had seen Cassini Ops. He hadn't, so I introduced him to the Ace and we answered his questions for ten minutes. He also had not seen Cassini's closeup image of Enceladus, with those extensive, warm crevasses that are feeding the E Ring. We spent a minute discussing the 3-foot glossy hardcopy on the wall by the elevator.

I phoned in to the 3pm meeting and learned that OTM-37 was being cancelled, while I worked on my Titan presentation for tomorrow night's public talk. Microsoft sure puts up a good fight. I finished up and left for home about 7:30 pm.

With the OTM cancelled, there will be commands to approve late tomorrow afternoon for an IVP update to be sure we capture Dione right where the optical instruments think it will be. Inertial Vector Propagator. Cassini's attitude system uses it to predict where satellites, rings, and Earth are. So Friday will be a long, not a short, day, but with a break for lunch at the Indian Buffet restuarant in Pasadena with the team.

Greg darkened my doorway to lament that the layoffs of 5% of JPL's workforce to be announced Monday will include employees as well as contractors. He had spoken earlier with a random 30-year employee who had just been given his harsh notice.

I will be hoping to be spared a termination shock.

Thursday October 13, 2005

My flight ops team and I have been holding our collective breath this week. The figure has gone to 8% for layoffs. At Greg's all-hands meeting today he had basically no information, other than we will be told tomorrow.

National Public Radio said NASA is now focusing less on robotic space missions, thus the layoffs at JPL. That's about 100% more information than management has let out to any of us employees. It looks like chaos is reigning up in the "nose-bleed" heights of the administration building, while way down here we're just trying to fly the spacecraft without messing up.

So tomorrow we should get our "jobornot" notices. Unless we don't. Which sounds like that might be possible too.

Tonight we're checking out the new software we sent up to the Composite Infrared Spectrometer instrument. The ground system has been set up to deal with its new telemetry formats.

Friday October 15, 2005

So, the news is that there is no news. I guess it's a good thing that the layoffs have not materialized, at least within my team on Cassini. As Valentine Michael Smith would say, "Waiting is." Waiting for the overhead axe to fall or go away, that is.

So I took the afternoon off, burning 4 hours of vacation as I like to do on a Friday afternoon when possible, and went to Ikea. My pager went off. "Anomaly meeting soon. Call the Ace."

I called the Ace, from a pay phone in Ikea's lobby beside a screaming kid. (I have remained cell-phone-free this long.)

It seems the Ace had inflicted the anomaly himself, by uplinking the wrong command file. He had inadvertently turned off CIRS while it was testing its new software. This is a rare, once in a career kind of mistake, and it is easily explainable given the circumstances. The measures that will help prevent a recurrence are obvious, and can be in place first thing next week, to close the ISA (Incident / Surprise / Anomaly) documentation. But it worried the Ace immensely, what with that axe haning overhead, though the error is really unrelated to the layoff picture.

I did get home by 5 pm.

Wednesday October 19, 2005

Went to Ramo Auditorium to hear journalist Chris Mooney talk about his book, The Republican War on Science. Ramo was packed with lots of familiar faces from the community, as well as students. I guess I'll get his book from Amazon and read it.

He pointed out that there was no intentional correlation between his name and that unflattering view of the elephant on the cover design.

Sunlight pierced the clouds this afternoon. The canyon has its wonderful, rich post-rain smells that I love. The fire danger has vanished for a while.

Wednesday October 26, 2005

Wrapped up preparations to start teaching "Basics of Interplanetary Flight" at the Art Center College of Design in January. It's going to be fun.

Layoffs continue to pop up here and there. Today the team drove down to Soup Plantation in Pasadena for Danny's goodbye lunch. His System Administrator position was scheduled long ago to end now. News comes once in a while about this person or that person being laid off from Cassini or elsewhere around lab. I ran into my group supervisor this morning on the JPL mall, and he said he thought he was about finished with all the layoffs within our Mission Control Engineering group. I hope so.

Sunday October 30, 2005

Mitch and I drove separately to Aux Delices, the little French bakery on Colorado Boulevard in Old Town Pasadena this morning for breakfast. We got there at 8:00 am (which felt like 9am; we observed the change back to standard time). The woman was just showing up who unlocked the door and started the coffee brewing.

Mitch left for work, his "Friday," and I went to the bank and the hardware store. Pacifica Radio was playing a vintage recording of the late Alan Watts speaking to his ferry-boat full of listeners in Sausalito sometime around 1970. He was making an analogy of our convention of timekeeping, which includes daylight saving time, to our concepts of religions. He said one such convention that many humans subscribe to is believing that we have to believe in a religion.

The Ace hasn't called me all weekend. That means the telemetry playback from the Titan-8 targeted ancounter must have gone well. Clear skies were forecast for Madrid for the downlink. This encounter included a synthetic-aperture radar image swath covering the area in which Huygens landed on January 14. That SAR swath will have an important component of "ground truth" from Huygens. We have a meeting at midnight tonight to approve Orbit Trim Maneuver #41.

Friday November 11, 2005

Mitch and I drove to Sierra Madre to meet Kathy for breakfast at 8 am. She is off today, Veteran's Day, and had just dropped her daughter off at school there. I took a whole day of vacation from JPL, in compliance with the new "no partial vacation day" rule. During the week I worked to prepare one engineer, who recently returned to Cassini Flight Ops part time, to be able to take care of the routine Friday meetings and tasks, plus the special tasks today for handling Sunday's Orbit Trim Maneuver. He just called me at 1:45 pm to say the OTM meetings are postponed (no big surprise) until a little later this afternoon. And he can't stay that late because of dinner reservations. I suggested he call our boss, who had promised me that this guy's schedule would be amenable to realtime operations work. The boss should be able to do everything; we recently got him all the electronic permissions needed for the commanding stuff. I'll go in tomorrow, though, to make sure everything is actually ready for Sunday.

Last weekend I read President Jimmy Carter's latest book. Having listened to him interviewed by Larry King last Friday, I went right to Vroman's and bought a copy. A quote:

"Our nation has declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and has disavowed many long-standing global agreements, including judicial decisions, nuclear arms accords, controls on biological weapons, environmental protection, the international system of justice, and the humane treatment of prisoners. ... It is no longer considered necessary to observe restraints on attacking other nations militarily, provided often uncertain intelligence sources claim that their military or political policies might eventually be dangerous to the United States."

Carter makes it clear that the most important factor in arriving at this situation, is that fundamentalist Christians have become increasingly influential in both religion and government, and have managed to change the nuances and subtleties of historic debate into black-and-white rigidities and the personal derogation of those who dare to disagree. He voices concern that many of these fundamentalists' bizarre belief in every word of LaHaye and Jenkins' "Left Behind" series of novels and their influence on middle-east policies. They have a personal responsibility to hasten the coming of "the rapture" that they believe is prophesied.

"Based on these premises, some top Christian leaders have been in the forefront of promoting the Iraqi war... and ha[ve] been a major factor in America's quiescent acceptance of the massive building of Israeli settlements and connecting territory on Palestinian territory in the West Bank."

Despite so-called Christian leadership, "...there is a strange and somewhat disturbing situation in our country. Americans are willing to be generous in helping others -- and they believe that our government gives as much as 15 percent of our federal budget in foreign aid. But we are, in fact, the stingiest of all industrialized nations... in fact our government's share for other nations today is 0.0016 of our gross national income. If we add all the donations from American foundations and from all other private sources to the government's funds, the total still amounts to 0.0022 of our national income."

I find the facts in President Carter's book somewhat surprising despite my long-standing distrust and incredulity in the "W" administration, and very disturbing. I deeply wish I could be proud of my country, but it would require 180-degree reversals in just about every avenue.

This veteran is ashamed.

Saturday November 19, 2005

Here's a cartoon I thought good enough to steal blatently from this month's issue of "Church & State" from Americans United.

Sunday November 20, 2005

Required reading:

This article by reporter at large Jane Mayer in the November 14 New Yorker, "A Deadly Interrogation," sheds light on some highly objectionable, clearly immoral and criminal, actions being undertaken by the United States' Bush Administration. (If for some reason it isn't viewable on the New Yorker's site, I have copied it in its entirety here, although without any of the magazine article's formatting.)

Our country is doing abominable things in our name, as secretly as possible, financed by you and me, and by the next few generations. The "W" administration invaded Iraq so eagerly in the first place because "Sadam was so bad..." committing torture, killing large numbers of people (not to even mention the trumped-up WMDs). Yet the United States insists on flagrantly violating the Geneva Conventions, and the administration opposes humane controls on the C.I.A.'s "right" to torture and murder prisoners. A hundred thousand people have died as a result of our unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The man pictured dead at right was alive and well, and being cooperative when the C.I.A. led him into the Abu Graib prison for interrogation. His hands were cuffed behind his back, then he was suspended with his hands shackled to the bars of a window five feet above the floor. He died of asphyxiation in that posture, characterized as a "Palestinian hanging."

Under the Bush Administration's secret and convoluted interrogation guidelines, the killing of Jamadi might not have broken any U.S. laws.

An excerpt from Mayer's article:

Senator Richard Durbin served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until January. In a recent interview at his office in the Capitol, he said, "You can't imagine what it's like to go to a closed room where you have a classified briefing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues in the Senate, and see hundreds and hundreds of slides like those of Abu Ghraib, most of which have never been publicly disclosed. I had a sick feeling when I left." He went on, "It was then that I began to have suspicions that something significant was happening at the highest levels of the government when it came to torture policy."

Since then, Durbin has been trying to close the loopholes that allow government personnel to engage in brutal interrogations. Last year, he introduced an amendment to the defense-authorization bill affirming that the C.I.A. was covered by U.S. laws forbidding torture and the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners. But his effort met intense resistance from the Bush Administration, and the amendment did not pass.

Durbin tried other legislative stratagems, without much success. Eventually, John McCain took up Durbin's cause. The Abu Ghraib scandal seems not to have chastened Cheney or any other Administration officials; in fact, they are for the first time arguing openly and explicitly that C.I.A. personnel should be exempt from standards that apply to every other American. "I'm concerned that the government isn't going forward on these prosecutions," Durbin said of the C.I.A. cases.

(Emphasis mine.)

It's no wonder at all the United States is so widely hated. I surely hate what we are doing, while what we should be doing remains a distant dream.

What can we citizens do if we do not agree with these actions? Sit down, shut up, and be forced to finance them? What is our recourse?

Saturn-day November 26, 2005

Yessir, yessir, three bags full! That's how much leaf mulch I made vacuuming up debris from the Chinese elm tree and the Oak this morning. It all got mixed in with the $3 bag of chickenshit I bought yesterday from Home Depot in Monrovia. Added a little water, and it is having a wonderful time warming up inside the compost bin (pictured at right). Mitch squeezes fresh orange juice every morning, and all the rinds go in there too. It's amazing how fast the worms convert kitchen waste into castings. Two or three days at most!

The morning started misty and foggy with a deep marine layer. Mitch left me a message to say how nice Descanso Gardens was in the misty haze, while I was at Art Center. Beah left me a message too!

A mild cold front moved through in the afternoon, blowing away all the hazy, foggy, ocean layer, leaving brisk gusty winds from the northwest as the cool high pressure mass moved in. They'll probably shift and become northeast Santa Ana winds later, as the high continues to travel east.

Cassini will be passing 500km from the surface of Rhea this evening. Rhea is a 1500-km diameter sphere of ice orbiting Saturn. All the instrument teams have commanded their observations, twisting and turning the spacecraft first to point the instruments, then toward Earth to communicate with the Ace. It took a couple of days' work to get ready in realtime ops. We're tracking right through closest appeoach, so the Radio Science team can use Cassini's Doppler shift to measure Rhea's mass.

All the images and other recorded data should be played back tomorrow.

It's 5:15pm. The Sun set twenty minutes ago, and the sky is spotless deep blue with Venus a beacon of the west and Mars glowing bright orange in the east. Beautiful!

Sunday December 18, 2005

Woke and watched Face The Nation, and Connddolleezzaa on Meet The Press horizontally, then crawled out of my warm nest to make breakfast with Mitch.

It's a beautiful day, the sky hazy and sunny. Absolutely quiet. And at 57° F, it's nice enough for me to enjoy, and for Mitch to tolerate, having most of the doors and windows wide open.

The religion salespeople came in the gate, walked up the path, and rang the doorbell. I was cleaning up in the kitchen after a nice breakfast, and Mitch welcomed them in, (!!!), offering coffee or tea, and chocolate-chip cookies that he baked last night. They had none. I listened from the other room for a while while Mitch engaged them in conversation about the Catholic Church using "gays in the seminary" as a diversion from its pederast problems, Ratzinger as pope, abortion, souls, and when life begins, interpreting the Bible as the literal truth of God, and how translations compare, etc., etc.

Wanting to wrap up this little session, I walked around and in from outside and said hello to both our visitors, then promptly reached for the magazines they had put on the table, "Awake!" and "Watchtower," commenting on what perfect titles they were for religious publications. I suggested that we awake right now and watch in perfect thoughtless silence as the God of the Universe (yes, "atheist" David used those words) manifests right here, right now, in silent presence when we humans care to skillfully shut up our constantly running conceptual thoughts and arguments, and simply watch. Witness Jehovah indeed.

Winter Lights

They left! I sat outside by the boulder and read the juvenile magazines within a few minutes, as I promised them I would, then started in on the new New Yorker.

The spacecraft is speeding down its roller-coaster ride from last week's apoapsis of Saturn orbit #19, toward a whip through periapsis Christmas Eve, and encounter with Titan on Donald's birthday 12/26. Its new command sequence, S17, is set to begin executing today.

The rest of the winter lights went up today.

Monday December 26, 2005

Donald's Birthday

Don would have been 59 years old. A flower sits by his picture today and a candle burns in the colorful glass enclosure from Almitra's main cabin.

Mitch gave me a gripping book for Christmas and it's turning into a great excuse for not working on my class notes this drizzly morning. I had always known in the back of my mind that the democratic process in the U.S. had some shady fringes to it, and brushed off the notion as par for the course. But author Andrew Gumbel fills in the whole picture with specifics, making it pretty clear how rotten the system has become to ts core. It's not another anti-Bush book, but well-rounded and bipartizan in its content. Nonetheless, a quote from W heads the second chapter:

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier. Just so long as I'm the dictator."

-- George W. Bush six days after the Supreme Court made him president

I hate always having negative things to say when it comes to our republic. But I care deeply. And I think it is important to see where we are going, even if it may already be impossible to change its direction before arriving full-speed at the cliff.

Saturday January 7, 2006

The Boston Ivy completed its assignment in September to cover the entire north and east sections of perimeter fence. It lost all its leaves a few weeks ago. Now thousands of berries, clustered like little grapes, are completely exposed.

Some little migrating birds can be seen going after them now and then. The strangers are finch-size, though their black beaks are more pointed than finches', with grey lower bodies, black uppers, and a jay-like black tuft. They will pick a berry on the fly, cheeping, then sit atop the fence cap to swallow it and cheep some more before their next berry.

Rarely, Big Bird, the local pea-hen, will stroll along the fence cap picking berries.

Thursday January 19, 2006

A good day in interplanetary space.

The Stardust scientists, having watched a picture-perfect Earth-atmosphere entry and soft landing of their cargo, a cannister of samples from the tail of Comet Wild-2 and interstellar dust grains, are happy. They opened the cannister today to find a bounty of samples stored safely as intended in the collector's aerogel. An all-JPL-hands message from Charles Elachi congratulated employees on the success of "our collective effort." I guess he must have intended the pun. I can at least hope he did.

The New Horizons spacecraft launched this morning on its Atlas-V, heading for a fast flyby of Pluto via Jupiter gravity assist. Pluto encounter will be in 2015.

Last but not least, I started teaching tonight at Art Center College of Design. The past couple of weeks have been a steep uphill climb, gathering all the hardware and props I wanted to have available for various visuals, and hands-on demonstrations. Not to mention writing and copying all sorts of stuff for administrative documentation, participant handouts, etc., and polishing my electronic "slide" presentation. From here on out, it should be far easier. Still lots to prepare, but all the first preparations and unknowns are behind me. I left work at the Day Job on time, or maybe a few minutes early (no anomalies popped up requiring me to stay, thank goo'ness). Microwaved a liesurely tofu-corndog dinner, then arrived with the Travelling Show an hour before class-time of 7 pm. I was STRONGLY hoping for the classroom to be empty of any previous class session, because I wanted lots of time to set up all the stuff I had brought: laptop, projector, live camera to view the sink(1), handouts, hands-on sunspot-magnetics demo and light-bulb demo(2). Plus, I wanted enough time to try the wireless internet connection that the computer-tech people said "should work ok with this login-ID, password, and network setup parameters." (It did work fine after a few minutes of clicking and keyboarding.) I really didn't want to be fumbling all that stuff while a classroom was emptying and immediately filling up.

The place was empty but for one student who had arrived early, and he helped me set up the chairs.

The classroom filled up (a few minutes late), and the students are all very interested and smart. This is going to be FUN! Next week we're going to deploy a 200-ft wide make-shift scale model of our solar system in the great big "Wind tunnel" room (the South Campus was converted from an old Caltech wind tunnel facility).

(1) Ed Stone pioneered the use of a view of water streaming from a faucet into the sink, to show an analogy of how the solar wind piles up at the termination shock, which Voyager-1 recently penetrated. And hey, the Art Center classroom had a SINK right there in the corner!! How could I have ignored that?!?

(2) A 110-V clear lightbulb powered from a 220V transformer with dimmer, to illustrate the color temperatures of stars, using the tungston filament visible inside. The filament was supposed to have vaporized, going super-nova at around 220V, but for some reason it remained intact, unlike in previous tests with slightly different bulbs.

Sunday January 22, 2006

No calls from the Ace all weekend. A good sign that things are ok in Saturn orbit.

Made breakfast around 10 this morning with Mitch. Sitting around reading and enjoying the warm sun and not-too-cool breeze sounds like a good way to spend the rest of today at home. I should also finish up plans for next Thursday's class.

Thursday February 16, 2006

Teaching at ArtCenter is an immense pleasure. And they pay me. Each of my students is brilliant and eager. They are artists and designers, and one is a physician. It's great to see them every week, and I'll miss them when the term is over in two weeks.

Dr. Michelle Thaller, an astronomer from Spitzer, visited the class tonight and gave a paradigm-shifting presentation using her far-infrared camera. There is so much to see beyond the visible light!

It was getting late in the evening when we started discussing hypergolic propellants in a spacecraft propulsion system, and so it was with a great deal of fun that I wrangled their full attention by holding up a glass jar containing a dark-pee yellow fluid while talking about how some spacecraft use monomethyl hydrazine (nasty stuff!) as one propellant... I held up a bottle of dirty-blue liquid to talk about how a violent explosive reaction occurs when you mix in nitrogen tetroxide (even nastier stuff!). As if to demonstrate the spontaneous reaction, I uncapped the "nitrogen tetroxide" and gingerly, at extended arm's length, poured it into the "hydrazine." Anticlimax: I confessed it was just colored water. But nobody was sleepy.

After class my student Jon was telling me he was thinking, "no, he's not really going to do that right here in the classroom... and for pete sakes it's in a GLASS jar that could shatter!" Good belly laughs.

But they will certainly remember how hypergolics work in a propulsion system! I love it.

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