Curiosity's picture of Mars

The view from inside Gale Crater

Triple P loves this shot of the Martian landscape from NASA's Curiosity Rover.  So far the pictures from the craft have been a little disappointing with black and white pictures of what look like someone's gravel path.  This, however, is a wonderful view of another planet and a red planet at that!

We covered the launch of the Martian rover on our blog last November and was delighted that the fantastically complex landing sequence all worked perfectly; it really was a a major achievement in space exploration. 

Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris.  Could have been shot in Gale Crater too!

Back then we mentioned the new John Carter film and opined that we did not have high expectations of it.  The critics agreed and gave it a particularly vitriolic reception; to the extent that Disney lost huge amounts of money on it. When we eventually watched it on DVD, however, we really enjoyed it and overdressed though she was, Lynn Collins' performance as Dejah Thoris was excellent. It's a shame there won't be any more films in the series.

Martian pyramid in Total Recall (1990)

Just opening this week is a (unnecessary) remake of Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990) which we were going to see until we found out that the characters don't go to Mars in it.  How ridiculous!  It was the Martian scenes that made the Schwarzenegger film (and it was very much his film; he had a lot of creative control over it, even down to choice of director).  Indeed, Jerry Goldsmith's excellent score contained some suitably "alien" musical effects that added greatly to the Martian atmosphere (so to speak) of the movie.

Sharon Stone in Total Recall

Likewise, much as we admire the lithe form and elegant features of Kate Beckinsale we really can't see her competing, as hero Quaid's wife, with Sharon Stone in her prime.  

More on Martian princesses another time...

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Solar Wind Ship by Frank Tinsley

Here is an elegantly spare illustration of a solar wind ship by Frank Tinsley from 1959.  Approaching Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons the aluminium foil covered sail ships trail a nuclear powered ferry rocket for lunar landing missions.  This is a very effective illistration just using a black, white and yellow pallette.

This is one of a series of pictures that Tinsley did for advertisements for the American Bosch Arma Coporation between 1958 and 1960.  Arma was originally founded in 1918 and supplied searchlights to the US Navy. They merged with the American Bosch Corporation in 1954.  ABAC supplied theinertial guidance system for the Atlas missile and some of the electronics for the Apollo Lunar Module.

This 30 foot tall unicycle's purpose was for exploring the moon.  A spare tyre acts as a bumper for when exploring narrow defiles. A solar powered "parasol" provides power. 

The picture for this advertisement related to the realisation that in the future the world would be encircled by dead satellites.  Rather then letting them fall to earth at random this pictuire contemplates a salvage tug positioning them so that when they drop there is no chance of them landing on inhabited areas.

This 1958 picture shows the construction of a space station in the traditional, for the fifties and sixties, wheel shape.  Presumably this shape was because it was contemplated that they would spin, in order to create artificial gravity, something we haven't managed yet. 

Here is a supply rocket landing at a moon base.  The advertisements contemplated rockets the size of the Empire State Building being powered by a nuclear pulse engine firing out atomic bombs.

The final picture is of another nuclear powered rocket approaching Mars.  It is designed to fly nose first as a rocket and then tail first when it reaches the Martian atmosphere as a ramjet. 

AgentTriple P loves these views into a future that never was from the height of the space race.

Aviation and space specialist illustrator Frank Tinsley was born in Manhattan in 1899. After high school he worked as an apprentice artist in the research department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  His brief military service in World War One was spent in the Design Section of the War Department. 

By the twenties he was a freelance illustrator selling pictures to magazines such as Air Stories, Air Trails, Bill Barnes Air Trails,  Lariat Story,  Sky Birds, War Birds, and Western Story.  By the forties he also had his own newspaper comic strip, Yankee Doodle later changed to Captain Yank.

In the fifties he wrote and illustrated articles for Mechanix Illustrated.  He died in 1965.

Frank Tinsley

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Launch of the new Martian Rover

Lift-off on Saturday 26th November 2011

The big space news this week, of course, is the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory mission which blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Saturday using an Atlas V launch vehicle.

Destination Mars: Gale Crater

Carrying the big new Martian rover, Curiosity (named by a schoolgirl as part of a competition), it is due to arrive at its landing site, Gale Crater, sometime in August 2012.  The mission is designed to see if Mars could, or has ever, hosted life.

The Curiosity rover hangs beneath the lander

Landing on Mars is tricky.  The atmosphere is too thick to use purely a rocket descent (like the Lunar Module) but too thin for conventional parachutes.  The Rover and its lander  will use a combination of both.  The rover will be lowered to the Martian surface by the new sky crane system which hasn't been used on a mission before.  After parachuting through the atmosphere, at about a mile above the surface the rover and the lander will seperate from the protective aeroshell in which they have travelled from orbit.  The lander will fire its hydrazine rocket thrusters and slow the descent. The rover will be lowered by the sky crane system until it hangs around 25 feet below the lander. A soon as it is confirmed that the rover is on the surface the lander will sever the connections to the rover and fly off to one side for a crash landing.  This sounds like proper space exploration but there does seem to be an awful lot that could go wrong.  Anything involving cables and explosive severing systems sounds like a recipe for disaster!  Let's hope not!

Mock-ups of the Mars Exploration Rover (Spirit and Opportunity 2004-2010) left, Mars Pathfinder (Sojourner 1996) centre and the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity 2012-2014) right showing size comparison

The rover, which can move at about 30 metres an hour, is designed to operate for 686 days, which sounds like an odd amount but is actually the length of a Martian year.  Curiosity is much bigger than previous rovers.  The original tea tray sized Sojourner rover weighed 11.5 kilos and was 65 centimetres long.  Curiosity weighs 900kg and is 3 metres long; about the size of a small car.  Sojourner is about the size of one of Curiosity's wheels. It is about five times the size of the more recent Mars Exploration Rovers.

This picture of technicians working on Curiosity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory gives an idea of its scale.  It will be the biggest vehicle to land on another body in the Solar System.  It is about the same length as the Lunar Rover but is more than four times the weight.

Those fun loving scientists have cut the initials of JPL in Morse code into the vehicle's wheels so it will literally leave a trail of their name across the Martian landscape.

Its all engagingly science fiction -like, although it seems a long way from the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian novels which Triple P read when he was younger.

Bruce Pennington's evocative cover for the New English Library paperback of A Princess of Mars (which Triple P still has up in the loft somewhere)

Actually, there is a strange connection between the Curiosity rover and the Burroughs novels.  Avatar director James Cameron was working with the JPL team on a 3D camera for the Curiosity rover but, sadly, they couldn't get it ready in time.  Cameron himself has admitted that one of his major influences on Avatar was A Princess of Mars! 

James Cameron (right) and the Curiosity rover camera team

There is a big budget film of A Princess of Mars due out next year; although they have re-named it John Carter, after the hero, but the trailer we have seen so far doesn't look brilliant. In fact, we prefer the look of the low budget Princess of Mars which came out two years ago.  Dejah Thoris, the princess in question, is far too overdressed in the new version, for a start, which is the downside of having Disney behind it!   But, who knows, maybe Curiosity will find a crashed Martian flier.

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NASA announces new Space Launch System

NASA has revealed today some early concept illustrations of its proposed new Space Launch System which is being designed to replace the former Ares I and Ares V with one multi-purpose vehicle as mandated in the NASA Authorisations Act of 2010.

The idea is to use as much existing technology as possible to keep the costs down.  For example it will use five of the R-25 main engines from the Space Shuttle and the same solid boosters as well, although there is a plan to have competing boosters designed by Aerojet and Teledyne Brown.

The first flight is scheduled, ambitiously, for December 2017 with a possible manned Lunar orbital flight in 2021.  In 2025 it is thought that they are planning a possible manned asteroid exploration flight with the big manned mission to Mars by 2031, although they haven't officially announced these dates.

The cost, for the next six years until the rocket launches, will be $10 billion for the vehicle itself, $6 billion for the crew vehicle and another $2 billion for upgrades to the Kennedy Space Centre to allow it to launch the huge rocket.

Its initial lift capacity will be 50 tonnes growing to a possible 130 tonnes as the system is developed and the more powerful boosters are designed.  This compares with the 22.7 tonne payload capacity of the Shuttle.  The entire stack will be about twice the height of the Shuttle launch group and at 335 feet only 30 feet short of the Saturn V.

NASA, with its eyes firmly on the budget, has designed the project so that the initial high development cost portion will be front-loaded to early in the programme so that inflation doesn't eat into the near on $60 billion  budget.  Using a lot of Shuttle technology means that they will be able to re-employ many of the technicians and companies that lost work when the Shuttle was cancelled.

As a child of the Space Race, Agent Triple P never really took to the Shuttle, an aesthetically unfortunate creature that looked like it was a collection of plastic toys sellotaped together.  For Triple P space exploration means big rockets and we think the new SLS (they will have to find an appropriate name for it) does the job perfectly.  We have lift-off!

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Space shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station

Agent Triple P loved this fantastic photograph of the Space Shuttle Endeavour docked with the ISS, which was published by NASA this week.   Given the Shuttle has flown to the ISS over thirty times (although that includes construction of course) it is amazing that this is the first picture taken of it docked to the space station.

Endeavour lands following its final flight

The photograph was taken on May 23rd this year, by Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, from a departing Soyuz space craft.  This will be the only way to move personnel to and from the ISS until Project Ares comes online in 2014 (if it ever does).  Mission Control Moscow ordered a 130 degree change in attitude so Nespoli could take pictures and video from about 600 feet away.  There was an equally striking photograph of Endeavour as it landed at Kennedy Space Centre on June 1st after its final flight.    After 25 flights, 299 days in space, 4,671 orbits and 122,853,151 miles flown the Endeavour is being retired to a Californian museum: almost certainly prematurely.  Now there is just the final Shuttle flight of Atlantis due to launch next month.  

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Bricks in Space!

The very Star Trek like Mission poster for STS 134

Today the Space Shuttle Endeavour launched from Kennedy Space Centre on its final flight.   The flight was supposed to have launched on April 29 but a generator failure delayed it.  This will be Endeavour's 25th flight and the 134th Shuttle flight overall.  Endeavour is the newest shuttle, commissioned as a replacement for the ill-fated Challenger, and first flew in 1992.

Endeavour on the launch pad this morning

After her flight and de-commissioning she will be donated to the California Science Center although her Canadarm will be removed and sent to an, as yet, un-named Canadian museum.

AMS 02

Although the main job of mission STS-134 will be to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (to detect space particles) and an ExPRESS logistics carrier (A sort of super USB port hub to plug experiments onto) to the International Space Station the mission is also carrying 13 Lego brick sets for the astronauts to build and observe the effects of buiding Lego in microgravity.  Just don't drop any bits and let them go floating into any vital bits of the station! 

STS launches this morning at 8.56 EDT: there are now Lego bricks in space!

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Fifty years since the first human in space...

Yuri Gagarin on board Vostok 1 April 12th 1961

Agent Triple P was very much a child of the Space Race: the first piece of music we remember was Telstar by the Tornados from 1962 (incidentally the first single by a UK group to make it to number one in America) which celebrated the first AT&T communications satellite of the same name. Even though we were too young to remember it we can’t let this week pass by without noting the achievement of Yuri Gagarin in becoming the first person in space on April 12th 1961.

Gagarin during flight training in 1955

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on 9th March 1934 in Klushino, west of Moscow. The village was occupied by the Germans during World War 2 and one of his brothers and his sister were taken to Germany and forced to work as slave labourers by the SS, although they both returned home after the war. In 1950 after working as an apprentice at the Lyubertsy Steel Plant in Moscow he was transferred to a technical college in the Volga river port city of Saratov. He joined the local air cadet force and learned to fly, being recommended for the Military Pilot’s School at Orenburg in 1955. He made his first jet flight in 1957 in a MiG-15. Posted to the grim Luostari airbase in Murmansk, nearly 200 miles inside the Arctic circle, when mysterious recruiting teams arrived from Moscow looking for volunteers to fly a new secret craft he and his new wife Valya, who had just given birth to a baby daughter, thought that anything had to be better than Luostari.

The Vostok 1 spacecraft just before the historic flight

 

He found that he had joined the new cosmonaut squad and underwent intensive training. His diminutive size (he was 5’2”) helped in his selection, given the tiny capsule being developed. Eventually the choice as to who would become the first human in space came down to two out of the twenty trainees: Gagarin and Gherman Titov. The authorities thought that Titov was too middle class and as Gagarin’s parents both worked on a collective farm (although they were far from the peasants that the Soviets made out) he got the nod.

Vostok 1 on the launch pad in Kazakhstan

 

On April 12th at 7.10 am Gagarin climbed aboard the tiny spherical Vostok 1 capsule on top of Sergei Korolev’s R-7 launcher. Gagarin’s bravery cannot be in doubt as the launcher had failed on 25 of its 60 preceding flights; not exactly a sure thing!  He literally was going where no man had gone before!

Let's go!

 

After an hour’s delay to re-fit the capsule’s hatch everything proceeded normally, with the cool as a cucumber Gagarin’s heart rate being measured at just 64 beats per minute. Koralev, on the other hand, had to take heart medication as he was having chest pains.

Vostok 1 launch

At 9.07 the engines were ignited and, with a cry of “poyekhali!” (let’s go!) from Gagarin, Vostok 1 was blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome’s Site No 1. Ten minutes later Gagarin became the first human in orbit. In the next hour Gagarin circled the earth moving from East to West and crossing Siberia, the Pacific, the tip of South America, then over Central Africa, Egypt and Turkey.

 

The landing procedure did not go so well and after the rockets fired to begin the descent, over Angola, the service module which was supposed to separate from the capsule remained attached by wires. This affected the stability of the craft and it was only once Vostok 1 was over Egypt that the wires connecting the two parts of the spacecraft burnt through so that the service module was jettisoned and the correct landing pattern was achieved.

 

The capsule after landing

 

As was planned. Gagarin was ejected from the capsule at 7km above the ground and made a separate parachute drop from the capsule. They both came down to earth in the Saratov region, ironically not very far from where he had made his first flight. Gagarin was met by a terrified farmer and his daughter and had to explain that although he had indeed, as they feared, come from outer space he was a Russian like them!

The track made by the Vostok capsule on landing

The authorities soon flew in by helicopter to collect him where he was greeted with a deserved hero's welcome.

Gagarin, still in his flight suit, is greeted by Soviet soldiers

He spent the next few years touring the world as the Soviets felt that he was too valuable a propaganda instrument to risk on another space flight, much to Gagarin’s disgust.  Although he was a popular ambassador, memorably once refusing to sit under an umbrella in an open-top drive in Manchester despite torrential rain so that people could see him, the years on the road took their toll on him. 

Gagarin meets Gina Lollobrigida at the Moscow Film Festival

He turned to alcohol and women to get himself through the long tours away from home and his frustration at being unable to fly again.

Gagarin his wife and Khrushchev read the newspaper accouts of his flight

It was only when Nikita Khrushchev was replaced as premier by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964 that Gagarin was allowed to go back to work; helping out on the new Soyuz spacecraft. Gagarin found a huge number of technical problems in the craft but the KGB wouldn’t let these be reported in case it interfered with the planned launch of Soyuz 1 which was designed to occur on May Day 1967, to celebrate 50 years since the Russian Revolution. Soyuz 1 took off as scheduled but the parachute system on the capsule failed on re-entry resulting in the death of Gagarin’s friend, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov.

MiG-15UTI

 

Gagarin was determined to get back into space although Komarov’s death meant that the authorities had essentially banned any possibility of this. In order to improve his flight reflexes, however, Gagarin started training flights again. It was on one of these, in badly deteriorating weather, on 27th March 1968 that he and his instructor Vladimir Seryogin flying a two seater MiG-15UTI had a fatal crash. The exact causes are still unknown but an official enquiry, whose documents were only declassified in 2003, believed Gagarin had made a rapid movement in the plane; possibly to avoid a weather balloon.

Celebrations at the monument marking the landing point of Vostok 1 on April 12th 2011

Yuri Gagarin was only thirty-four years old when he died but his achievement will live on forever.

Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) First Human in Space: April 12th 1968

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Space Shuttle Discovery launches on its final flight today

Discovery on the launch pad earlier this month

At 21.50 UK time today the Space shuttle Discovery, the furthest travelled manned space craft in history, takes off for its final flight before retirement.  Discovery was also the shuttle that launched the Hubble telescope in 1990

The crew of STS 133 and Robonaut 2

First flown in August 1984, Discovery is the oldest of the three remaining shuttles with construction work on it starting in 1979. This will be its 39th mission, STS 133, and is also noteworthy in that it will carry the first humanoid robot (Robonaut 2) into space.  Robonaut 2 is designed to test robotic functions in zero gravity but ultimately could be used for genuine work alongside astronauts on the International Space Station. It's purpose is to be a much more dexterous machine than the main robotic arm which is really designed for manipulating large objects. It's pure science fiction!

An illustration of how Robonaut 2 would be connected to the ISS robot arm. It's like a Chesley Bonestell illustration from sixty years ago!

Discovery will replace the Enterprise at the Smithsonian Aerospace Museum at Dulles airport in Washington.  This is because, of course, whilst Enterprise was the first shuttle it was never designed to go into space and was only used in atmospheric flight testing.  Discovery will be an actual space veteran of 142 million miles and 351 days in space

Triple P offers the crew best wishes for their historic flight!

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