Photo manipulation of Skynet-1A hovering a planet

Britain’s Oldest Satellite On The Move: A Space Curiosity

November 11, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 9 Comments

Space and mystery always spark our curiosity, so when we stumbled upon the story of Skynet-1A, Britain’s first communication satellite from 1969, we knew it was worth exploring. The BBC recently highlighted its unexpected movement across the sky – you can check out their full coverage here. The idea that this half-century-old hunk of metal mysteriously shifted orbits leaves us with more questions than answers. Who moved Skynet-1A, and why?

Launched just months after the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Skynet-1A stood as a symbol of Cold War innovation, initially placed above East Africa to support British military communications. But unlike the silent drift of inactive satellites heading naturally eastward, Skynet-1A defied orbital norms, popping up halfway across the globe above the Americas. This wasn’t mere chance; someone or something had made it fire its thrusters, likely in the mid-1970s.

Experts like Dr. Stuart Eves and UCL’s Rachel Hill suggest the possibility of control being temporarily transferred to the US, particularly during maintenance periods at the UK’s RAF Oakhanger. Still, the specifics remain buried in lost records and decades-old international collaborations. Skynet-1A’s journey serves as a stark reminder of the persistent challenges in space and the gaps in our historical data.

Looking for more space oddities? Hackaday has some interesting articles on space debris. You can read the original BBC article here.

The Constant Monitoring And Work That Goes Into JWST’s Optics

November 11, 2024 by Donald Papp No comments

The James Webb Space Telescope’s array of eighteen hexagonal mirrors went through an intricate (and lengthy) alignment and calibration process before it could begin its mission — but the process is far from being a one-and-done. Keeping the telescope aligned and performing optimally requires constant work from its own team dedicated to the purpose.

Alignment of the optical elements in JWST are so fine, and the tool is so sensitive, that even small temperature variations have an effect on results. For about twenty minutes every other day, the monitoring program uses a set of lenses that intentionally de-focus images of stars by a known amount. These distortions contain measurable features that the team uses to build a profile of changes over time. Each of the mirror segments is also checked by being imaged selfie-style every three months.

This work and maintenance plan pays off. The team has made over 25 corrections since its mission began, and JWST’s optics continue to exceed specifications. The increased performance has direct payoffs in that better data can be gathered from faint celestial objects.

JWST was fantastically ambitious and is extremely successful, and as a science instrument it is jam-packed with amazing bits, not least of which are the actuators responsible for adjusting the mirrors.

Why The Saturn V Used Kerosene For Its Hydraulics Fluid

November 11, 2024 by Maya Posch 38 Comments

We usually think of a hydraulic system as fully self-contained, with a hydraulic pump, tubing, and actuators filled with a working fluid. This of course adds a lot of weight and complexity that can be undesirable in certain projects, with the Saturn V Moon rocket demonstrating a solution to this which is still being used to this day. In a blast-from-the-past, a December 1963 article originally published in Hydraulics & Pneumatics details the kerosene-based hydraulics (fueldraulics) system for the S-1C stage’s gimbal system that controlled the four outer engines.

Rather than a high-pressure, MIL-H-5606 hydraulic oil-based closed loop as in the Saturn I, this takes kerosene from the high-pressure side of the F1 rocket engine’s turbopump and uses it in a single-pass system. This cuts out a separate hydraulic pump, a hydraulic reservoir, which was mostly beneficial in terms of reducing points of failure (and leaks), ergo increasing reliability. Such was the theory at the time at least, and due to issues with RP-1 kerosene’s relatively low flash point and differences in lubricity properties, ultimately RJ-1, RP-1 and MIL-H-5606 were used during checkout leading up to the launch.

In hindsight we know that this fueldraulic system worked as intended with all Saturn V launches, and today it’s still used across a range of aircraft in mostly jet engines and actuators elsewhere of the Boeing 777 as well as the F-35. In the case of the latter it only made the news when there was an issue that grounded these jets due to badly crimped lines. Since fueldraulics tends to be lower pressure, this might be considered a benefit in such cases too, as anyone who has ever experienced a hydraulic line failure can attest to.

Featured image: Gimbal systems proposed for the F-1, oxygen-kerosene engine with a fueldraulic system. (Source: Hydraulics & Pneumatics, 1963)

LEAF Mission Seeks To Grow Plants On The Moon

November 6, 2024 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Space Lab's LEAF model crops & growth chamber. — Credit: Space Lab

We have seen a recent surge of interest in whether it’s possible to grow potatoes and other plants in Martian soil, but what is the likelihood that a future (manned) lunar base could do something similar? To that end [Space Lab] is developing the LEAF project that will be part of NASA’s upcoming Artemis III lunar mission. This mission would be the first to have Americans return to the Moon by about 2028, using the somewhat convoluted multi-system SLS-Starship-Lunar Gateway trifecta. The LEAF (Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora) science module will feature three types of plants (rape (Brassica Rapa), duckweed and cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) ) in an isolated atmosphere.

The main goal of this project is to find out how the plants are affected by the lunar gravity, radiation and light levels at the landing site at the south pole. This would be the equivalent of a hydroponics setup in a lunar base. After about a week of lunar surface time the growth chamber will be split up into two: one returning back to Earth for examination and the other remains on the surface to observe their long-term health until they perish from cold or other causes.

This is not the first time that growing plants on the lunar surface has been attempted, with China’s Chang’e 4 mission from 2019. The lander’s Lunar Micro Ecosystem featured a range of seeds as well, which reportedly successfully sprouted, but the project was terminated after 9 days instead of the planned 100 due to issues with heating the biosphere during the brutal -52°C lunar night. Hopefully LEAF can avoid this kind of scenario when it eventually is deployed on the Moon.

The Hardware pipeline consists of three parts: antenna, signal conditioners, and computer. The solid lines indicate LMR-400 cable (low loss microwave coax), whereas the dotted line represents USB 3.0. (Credit: Jack Phelps)

Tracking Hydrogen In Space With A Home Radio Telescope For 21 Cm Emissions

November 5, 2024 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

What do you get when you put a one-meter parabolic dish, an SDR, a Raspberry Pi, and an H1-LNA for 21 cm emissions together? The answer is: a radio telescope that can track hydrogen in the Milky Way as well as the velocities of hydrogen clouds via their Doppler shifts, according to a paper by [Jack Phelps] titled “Galactic Neutral Hydrogen Structures Spectroscopy and Kinematics: Designing a Home Radio Telescope for 21 cm Emission“.

The hardware pipeline consists of three parts: antenna, signal conditioners, and computer, as per the above graphic by [Jack Phelps]. The solid lines are low-loss microwave coax LMR-400 cable, and the dotted line represents USB 3.0 between the RTL-SDR and Raspberry Pi 4 system. This Raspberry Pi 4 runs a pre-made OS image (NsfSdr) by [Dr. Glenn Langston] at the National Science Foundation, which contains scripts for hydrogen line observation, calibration and data processing.

After calibration, the findings were verified using publicly available data, and the setup could be used to detect hydrogen by pointing the antenna at the intended target in space. Although a one-meter parabolic dish isn’t going to give you the most sensitivity, it’s still pretty rad that using effectively all off-the-shelf components and freely available software, you too can have your own radio telescope.

Flirting With Kessler: Why Space Debris Physics Make It Such An Orbital Pain

November 5, 2024 by Maya Posch 37 Comments

Picture in your mind a big parking lot with 131 million cars on it. Now imagine that they are spread out over the entire Earth’s inhabited areas. Although still a large number, it is absolutely dwarfed by the approximately 1.47 billion cars registered and in use today, with room to spare for houses, parks and much more. The 131 million represents the total number of known and estimated space debris objects in Earth orbit sized 1 mm and up, as per the European Space Agency. This comes on top of the approximately 13,200 satellites still in Earth orbit of which 10,200 are still functional.

Now imagine that most of these 131 million cars of earlier are sized 10 cm or smaller. Spaced out across the Earth’s entire surface you’d not be able to see more than at most one. Above the Earth’s surface there are many orbital planes and no pesky oceans to prevent millimeter and centimeter-sized cars from being spaced out there. This gives a rough idea of just how incredibly empty Earth’s orbital planes are and why from the International Space Station you rarely notice any such space debris until a small bit slams into a solar panel or something equally not amusing.

Cleaning up space debris seems rather unnecessary in this perspective, except that even the tiniest chunk travels at orbital velocities of multiple kilometers per second with kinetic energy to spare. Hence your task: to chase down sub-10 cm debris in hundreds of kilometers of mostly empty orbital planes as it zips along with destructive intent. Surely this cannot be so difficult with lasers on the ISS or something?

Continue reading “Flirting With Kessler: Why Space Debris Physics Make It Such An Orbital Pain” →

Voyager 1 Fault Forces Switch To S-Band

October 31, 2024 by Dan Maloney 70 Comments

We hate to admit it, but whenever we see an article about either Voyager spacecraft, our thoughts immediately turn to worst-case scenarios. One of these days, we’ll be forced to write obituaries for the plucky interstellar travelers, but today is not that day, even with news of yet another issue aboard Voyager 1 that threatens its ability to communicate with Earth.

According to NASA, the current problem began on October 16 when controllers sent a command to turn on one of the spacecraft’s heaters. Voyager 1, nearly a light-day distant from Earth, failed to respond as expected 46 hours later. After some searching, controllers picked up the spacecraft’s X-band downlink signal but at a much lower power than expected. This indicated that the spacecraft had gone into fault protection mode, likely in response to the command to turn on the heater. A day later, Voyager 1 stopped communicating altogether, suggesting that further fault protection trips disabled the powerful X-band transmitter and switched to the lower-powered S-band downlink.

This was potentially mission-ending; the S-band downlink had last been used in 1981 when the probe was still well within the confines of the solar system, and the fear was that the Deep Space Network would not be able to find the weak signal. But find it they did, and on October 22 they sent a command to confirm S-band communications. At this point, controllers can still receive engineering data and command the craft, but it remains to be seen what can be done to restore full communications. They haven’t tried to turn the X-band transmitter back on yet, wisely preferring to further evaluate what caused the fault protection error that kicked this whole thing off before committing to a step like that.

Following Voyager news these days feels a little morbid, like a death watch on an aging celebrity. Here’s hoping that this story turns out to have a happy ending and that we can push the inevitable off for another few years. While we wait, if you want to know a little more about the Voyager comms system, we’ve got a deep dive that should get you going.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.