December 2007 - Page 8 of 8

2007-12-04

I am going to view a launch again…

Well, almost… ;) I don’t make it to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. Of course, I’d love to see Atlantis rocket off the ground and head into space. See that, hear that, small that. But … I got another great opportunity. I’ll view the launch from ESA’s control center for the Columbus module. In some ways, it’s even cooler than standing on the Causeway…

I have written a few articles for a German online portal called raumfahrer.net. It’s a cool site and it is, believe it or not, about astronomy and space flight. I joined it when I wrote about the Cassini mission. I had not much time to do a lot of work, but I kept subscribed to their mailing list.

Last week, a mail arrived looking for folks interested in attending ESA‘s (the European space organisation) launch event in the Columbus Control Center in Munich, Germany. Of course, that drew my attention. But having not done much work… I stood by and waited. Nobody asked for the job, so I finally stepped out and offered to go over (a day before the press accreditation deadline). And, believe it or not, the nice guys from raumfahrer.net agreed.

Reporting on the launch event has now even become a team effort, with me being at one frontline in the control center and someone else being in a local ESA center. We also have some backoffice writers, who will consolidate all our information plus NASA and ESA streams into nice launch update articles. This in itself is a great experience and I am proud to be part of it.

Imagine it: me attending the official launch event as a member of the press and being right at that very place where the Columbus module will be controlled. I think I am a really lucky guy ;)

Even though the center is located in Germany, it is an European effort. The project leader is ESA. Columbus mission control will work closely with US and Russian mission controllers. In fact, the Columbus Control Center will go live as soon as the Columbus module is attached to the international space station. This is scheduled to happen on December, 10th, the day after EVA-1.

Now I am back again at finger crossing. The Columbus Control Center is close to Munic, which is around 300km (roughly 140 miles) away from my place. I can afford to spent one day going to there, but I can not stay for any other launch attempts. So I sincerely hope all will go well on December, 6th. Thankfully, things look quite good. But: keep you fingers crossed. If all goes well, I’ll provide some nice stories and pictures from the other end of the world ;)

2007-12-04

STS-122: weather near-perfect for launch

The weather forecast for Atlantis STS-122 December, 6th launch is close to perfect. Other than with STS-120, which had only a 40% chance of launch on time, the forecast for Thursday is no 90% favorable for launch!

The emergency landing sites are also all go. Even better, the weather forecast has improved – it was 80% yesterday. The trend looks good. Let’s cross fingers it remains the same…

2007-12-04

Countdown started for Atlantis

The countdown clock for space shuttle Atlantis STS-122 mission has been started Monday evening at 7pm EST. If all goes well, the countdown will culminate at an 4:31pm EST launch on Thursday, Dec., 6th. So far, no problems are expected. Everything runs exceptionally smooth. Even the weather forecast is predicting a 80% chance for launch!

So if you want to go to Kennedy Space Center to view the launch, its time to get ready. And if you do, please drop me a line with your experience. I’d greatly appreciate that.

Prior to countdown start, the payload bay doors have been closed. This can be seen on the picture. Shuttle Atlantis will ferry the European Columbus lab module to the international space station ISS. It is Europe’s major contribution to the orbiting outpost. Columbus will be managed from an ESA-Center in Germany.

The astronauts have also arrived at Kennedy Space Center. They are now doing final preparations and getting ready for their exciting ride to the skies.

Finally, let me quote NASA’s home page with some more details:

The launch team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida began the countdown Monday night for the launch of mission STS-122. Space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to lift off at 4:31 p.m. EST on Thursday to begin an 11-day mission to the International Space Station.

“All of our systems are in good shape,” said assistant launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson.

The weather forecast calls for an 80 percent chance of acceptable weather at launch time, weather officer Kathy Winters said.

“We’re very optimistic about it,” Winters said.

The seven astronauts who will perform the mission arrived at Kennedy at about 12:30 p.m. EST on Monday to begin their final preparations for the mission. Atlantis has a 10-minute window to launch so it can catch up with the International Space Station.

NASA astronaut Steve Frick will command the seven-man crew during the 11-day mission to attach the European-built Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station. Frick, Alan Poindexter, Rex Walheim, Leland Melvin, Hans Schlegel and Leopold Eyharts will fly aboard Atlantis during mission STS-122.

“It’s been a long time building to this moment, so we’re just absolutely ready to go,” Frick said.

Atlantis’ primary mission is to install the European laboratory called Columbus on the International Space Station. It will take a series of spacewalks, not to mention intricate maneuvers with robotic arms on the shuttle and station to complete the task.

“We flew by shuttle Atlantis on the launch pad and it’s a beautiful sight,” Poindexter said.

2007-12-04

Ares, Constellation, Orion, …

Sounds like pretty new terms? They are all about NASA’s next space program. The Constellation program is simply what is also called the “Vision for Space Exploration“.

In short, it means that new launchers and crew vehicles will be developed to ferry people to the international space station ISS, later on to the moon and even later to Mars. Ares is what the launchers are being called. Ares I will be the rocket that launches humans into space while Ares V is a heavy-lift rocket used to launch the heavy equipment. Finally, Orion is the name of the new crew capsules, also known as “Crew Exploration Vehicle”.

It looks quite doable to return to the moon, but sending humans to Mars is much more challenging. A lot of work needs to be done to solve the issues. I am sure they can be solved if we try hard enough, but the question is if there will be budget allocated to do so.

The Constellation program borrows heavily both from the Apollo as well as the Space Shuttle programs. For example, the overall launcher and capsule design is based on Apollo. The shuttle program contributes its boosters. Some folks tend to say that Constellation becomes more and more an Apollo V2, especially as the budget is quite constrained. It is not yet clear how far resuable the Orion capsules will be.

In my blog, I write about Constellation, Ares and Orion. While it is quite early to know any specifics, it is an interesting time to watch development. If you are interested in a specific topic, just follow the relevant labels.

2007-12-03

Launch Photography through a Telescope?

Do you remember Colin Ake? He is a fellow astronomer and STS-120 launch viewer. And he did a superb job at taking launch pictures:

Even though I did not notice that when I was at the causeway, Colin must have been quite close to my own location. So how come he could take such an up-close picture? Did he use professional camera equipment? Not at all. Being an astronomer, Colin had a Celestron C8 telescope right at hand:

Taking photographs through a scope is challenging. Taking photographs through a hand-held scope is outstanding! I am deeply impressed by the quality of Colin’s pictures.

I got some comments from Colin when I mentioned him in my “up-close picture taking” post. We exchanged a few comments and I was pleased that Colin offered me to show his pictures. I have taken a few from his site and moved them to my own server because I always like to make sure the images I reference will exist as long as my post (being an old web hack, I’ve had to many problems with changing URLs). Unfortunately, it took me some time to do it – much more than I anticipated. I hope Colin doesn’t mind…

If you would like to have a look at the full set, please visit Colin’s picture gallery. I highly recommend that!

Below, I have reproduced some of the shots that I like most:

2007-12-03

rsyslog now does postgres SQL!

I have just finished the integration of a new postgres sql output module for rsyslog. The code was provided by sur5r. I am more than glad that rsyslog now supports the popular postgres sql engine. I am sure this is a very nice addition for the community.

Sur5r’s able-coded code also provided some feedback about the output module interface in general. The good news is that the amount of code needed in the actual output module was as low as initially thought.

But it also proved that module design still is less than perfect: there was a new date format needed to support postgres sql. This could not be done in the output module. Instead, sur5r had to modify the core files. He did this in an excellent way, but the point is that it is not a good thing this was needed at all. It is a result of the old, non-modular syslogd design which we inherited from sysklogd and have not yet changed. In fact, we are at the very beginning of modularization. The next thing on the list is a loadable function interface. With that, such modifications will no longer be necessary, a custom (loadable) function can than be provided.

This enhancement requires a number of changes in the core, most importantly in the template subsystem. This is most probably the next area of work I am heading to.

But for the time being, let’s celebrate that rsyslog now has postgres sql support! It will be released in 1.20.0, hopefully around the end of the week. A preview will be announced on the mailing list somewhat earlier. And if you can’t wait, simply pull it out of anonymous CVS – it’s in there as of this writing.

2007-12-03

rsyslog now part of Fedora 8

Oops… I think I forgot to mention that rsyslog was recently included in Fedora 8. This is an important milestone for the rsyslog project, because it is the first time ever that it appears as the default syslogd in a wide-spread distribution.

Thankfully, a lot of other package maintainers have been found for other distros (I really appreciate your hard work, guys!), but everywhere else rsyslog is “just” an extra. In Fedora 8, it is the default logging daemon. I’d also like to add that Red Hat folks contributed quite a lot to rsyslog, including great testing.

Thanks to everyone who helped make rsyslog this capable. I think its appearance in Fedora 8 is rewarding for all of us!

2007-12-032018-06-11

rsyslog 1.19.12 released

I just released rsyslog 1.19.12. For the minor change I made in 1.19.11, I created a branch based on 1.19.10. I thought .11 would be the last release in that branch. Obviously, I was wrong. Working on two branches is definitely a lot of not really useful extra work. I’ll try to get thing together this week, then again only working with one branch. That will be the feature-enhanced 1.20.0 release.

2007-12-02

2008 Space Shuttle Launches

I thought I post some potential launch dates for 2008. Only the February date for STS-123 is officially given by NASA, the others are based on well-informed rumor. However, NASA has decided to continue to use space shuttle Atlantis after the Hubble service mission in August 2008. That will most probably affect the overall launch scheduled. I would be very careful planning anything based on the dates given below, as they are likely to change.

February , 2008: STS-122, flown by space shuttle Atlantis.

March, 11th, 2008: STS-123, flown by space shuttle Endeavour

May, 31st, 2008: STS-124, flown by space shuttle Discovery

August, 28th 2008: STS-125, flown by space shuttle Atlantis. This is the famous Hubble space telescope servicing mission. Please note that for this launch it will be the last time in history that you can see two space shuttles being at the launch pads at the same time. Atlantis will be at pad 39A and Endeavour will be at pad 39B, ready to launch for a (hopefully never needed) rescue mission. Pad 39B will be handed over to the Ares/Constellation (NASA’s new moon program) after this launch.

October, 16th 2008: STS-126, flown by space shuttle Endeavour

December, 4th 2007: STS-119, flown by space shuttle Discovery

All missions except STS-125 are ISS construction flights and will be launched from pad 39A.

2007-12-01

Atlantis still set for launch on December, 6th

The agency-level flight readiness review held yesterday concluded with the expected December, 6th launch date for Atlantis STS-122 mission. This continues Atlantis’ exceptionally well processing flow. No major problems occurred and this is probably one of the cleanest mission preparations for a long time.

Space Shuttle Atlantis is sitting at launch pad 39A and will rocket into space at 4:31p EST next Thursday. It will deliver the European Columbus space lab. It will be attached to the Harmony module which was brought up into space by Discovery’s STS-120 mission.

Meanwhile, the international space station crew has more or less finished the connection of Harmony to its final destination. This is a perquisite for STS-122, as Columbus will be mounted on one of Harmonies docking port. There are some news on a failed leak check, but it is said that this was most probably a sensor issue, not an actual leak. Sensor problems are common and so it looks very good from the ISS point of view, too.

What is becoming an increasing concern is abrasion in a solar array rotary joint (SARJ). This was detected a bit prior to STS-120. Discovery’s crew brought some samples back to earth, which are now being analyzed. Some more images and samples have been collected by the ISS crew. While the SARJ issue is no constraint for STS-122, it could (and probably will) affect future missions. Without a properly-working SARJ, the station can not generate enough power to support its final configuration. As far as it looks now, the repair will be quite complex and require a number of spacewalks, maybe carried out in February’s STS-123 mission. But it is way to early to know anything exactly – engineers are still evaluating the problem.