15 January 2006
| Observing Location | Rose Center for Earth and Space, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY |
|---|---|
| Observational Period | 0430-0730 EST |
| Atmospheric Conditions | Conditions are not looking good out in the west for observing this event, but the museum is going to be open and showing the live NASA coverage on the big screen so I am going to go down to see whatever there is to be seen.
CSC for the nearest uprange location indicates poor visibility so the tail will probably not bee seen as the Science Return Capsule (SRC) plummets through the atmosphere.
The forecast for the nearest range location is for snow so the helicopters probably will not be used to recover the capsule meaning the operation will be protracted and we will be kicked out of the museum before it is completed.
I am trying to catch a cold/flu and should have stayed home in bed trying to get healthy. But this mission is only going to occur once so got up at 0230 EST to make my way down to the museum. When I got outside I was greeted by a blizzard. It was snowing heavily and the winds were blowing strongly. It had just gotten nasty recently so there wasn't a lot of snow on the ground yet and waking was still easy. I made good time getting to the subway and actually caught the train before the one I had intended on. Yesterday I checked the online train and bus schedules to make sure that I would make all the necessary connections to get to the museum on time. When I was walking up the avenue to the bus stop a bus was just pulling into the stop. I didn't remember one due at that time but wasn't worried since there was one due at 0400 EST. I checked the schedule at the stop and it said the bus that had just left was on time and the next bus was not due until 0444 EST which is after the program was due to have begun. It appears that the schedule MTA has posted on their web site is out of date. That necessitated a walk to the West Side. I took a chance that I wouldn't be spotted walking through the park and it was a nice trip. I was probably the only person in the park and it was silent except for the occasional passage of a car on the nearby transverse road, and the wind. When I got up to Belvedere Castle I stopped for a couple of minutes to look out over Turtle Pond and The Great Lawn. Due to the darkness and the snow I couldn't see any farther that the street lamps along the walk at the south end of The Great Lawn. With .25-.5" in of snow on the ground it was a little slick going downhill through Shakespeare Garden but I made it down and out of the park without seeing anyone else. I arrived at the planetarium at 0345 EST and had to wait outside until about 0415 EST when the guards let us into the lobby to wait until they were ready for us downstairs. By 0730 EST, when I left the planetarium, the snow had stopped and the museum had plowed the walks with a truck. Everywhere the tires had been there was packed snow that had turned to ice. The walking was treacherous. |
| Instruments | NASA TV |
| Observing Party | Charlie Ridgway Derik Snow The public |
 NASA graphic | |
| Target | Stardust |
| Constellation | |
| Category | Satellite |
| Time | 20060115.0518 EST |
| Comments |
The Science Return Capsule (SRC) was jetisoned by the rest of the satellite this morning and was going to free fall the rest of the way to the target area. There are no thrusters onboard to correct its course once it is released. In a graphic of the SRC that we saw at the planetarium the upper half of the SRC was indicated to be the avionics deck but it was virtually empty. There was one box there that probably contained the altimeters and other electronics used to deploy the parachutes. A large portion of that chamber was probably occupied by the chutes which were just not shown in the graphic. Anyway, the flight plan called for the capsule to streak over northern California and northern Nevada before landing in Utah.
 NASA graphic
The landing site is on an ordinance range in the Utah desert south of The Great Salt Lake. They said that weather conditions were good enough to do a helicopter recovery but that high winds were going to move the landing site north of the target but, I guess, still within the target ellipse.
After landing three helicopters were to fly out to recover the SRC. The first helicopter would locate the capsule and contain military personnel who would search the area for any unexploded bombs (that is what the military tests there, but actually they hope that they explode on impact) and select landing sites for the next two helicopters. It would have been a real bummer if, after seven years of flight, the SRC had detonated an unexploded shell on landing.
There was a concern that water in the area might be a problem. When NASA and the military first surveyed the landing site during the planning stages of the mission the water table was 10' below the surface. But last year it was only 8". It has since dropped to a lower level but is still high. If the capsule should land in a bomb crater it might end up in a puddle of water. The SRC is not air tight so water could seep inside. Aerogel, which is what is supposed to have trapped grains of comet dust when the satellite flew through the tail of Comet Wild 2, does not like water. The second helicopter contains the SRC recovery specialists who will clean the capsule and fill it with nitrogen gas then they will hand-carry it to the third helicopter which will fly it to a clean room set up on the range. The SRC is about 2'x3' and weighs about 100 pounds. NASA has been requesting that amateur astronomers observe the reentry and I had hoped that we would see it streaking across the sky from somewhere uprange but that didn't happen. It would have been the closest I have come to seeing a spectacular comet tail live. We did see it on telescopic IR imagery from the test range but it just looked like a white dot bouncing around on a black background. All of the other imagery was from NASA's mission control at JPL in California. The helicopters did not have streaming video capability that was utilized (I am sure they have it but it is probably considered a matter of national security so we couldn't see it). The planetarium staff did a good job of interpreting the event and breakfast was free. After the capsule had been located NASA stopped streaming the event and we went up into the sky dome where they flew us out to the Kuiper Belt where the encounter took place. We spent about an hour in the dome and some of the kids even got to fly the simulator.
This evening I checked the SpaceWeather.com web site to see if they had any amateur reports of the reentry and found this image of the tail of the SRC made by NASA from their DC9 observation plane.
NASA Stardust mission web site
|
| Observing Location | New York City |
|---|---|
| Observational Period | |
| Atmospheric Conditions | CSC sent me email today telling me to go out observing tonight because the conditions would be better than usual, but I am stuck here in bed trying to get healthy. It looks like it will be fairly clear tomorrow during the day, and the sun is starting to fester, so maybe I can sneak in a little solar while I am out on a liquids resupply run to the supermarket. |
| Instruments | |
| Observing Party |
posted by Charlie at 23:17
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