Category: aerospace
NextSat, The End
Friday I had the privilege of being on console when we shut down NextSat. Adios, freefall in peace!
Mating dance
Orbital Express duo split apart, rejoin autonomously
A mission to test satellite servicing techniques took a giant leap forward in a 300-mile-high space ballet Saturday, when two spacecraft separated, spent an hour flying in tight formation, and automatically docked together again.
Woo-hoo! I wasn’t actually there at the time (yes, they do let me come home occasionally), [...]
Pictures from space
Our spacecraft:
More videos and images:
http://www.darpa.mil/orbitalexpress/mission_updates.html
http://boeing.com/ids/advanced_systems/orbital/oe_mm/index.html
http://boeing.com/ids/advanced_systems/orbital/oe_images.html
What I’ve been doing for the last week
Software glitch hinders Orbital Express demonstration
Not our software, the other guys’ software. It’s been a very long, busy week, but things are getting back to normal.
Quick Update
I’m in Albuquerque and we launched successfully Thursday night.
I’m working nights, sleeping days, not much excess brainpower left.
Water Treatment
Today we went to the open house held at Longmont’s new water treatment plant and had a little tour. It was a geeky little group - me, my husband the mechanical engineer with his long career in risk analysis for nuclear power plants, and an electrical engineer turned software engineer. The plant is very neat. [...]
Coverage
Our little home town newspaper had a nice article about Deep Impact, locally slanted. I must get a very early edition of the Denver Post, because its article, below the fold, was headlined “NASA waits for word on comet impact”, which means it must have been filed before midnight. By now, they’ve noticed that [...]
Impact!
Someone in the Deep Impact control room said, “I can’t believe they’re paying us to have this much fun.” It really is fun. The mission was utterly successful, absolutely no glitches or hangups at the last minute. It was a joy to watch. The images coming back from the impactor and the flyby were amazing.
Countdown
Twelve more hours…
MIA
It’s been a very busy couple of weeks.
My software project just finished FQT. It was scheduled to last 5 days. We’ve been doing dry runs of test procedures for the past 4 months. We had one last minute bug fix (literally last minute - 8:30 am Friday, with FQT beginning Monday).
We lost Day 1 re-releasing [...]
Random
I’m reading in everybody’s blogs about how hot it is; it’s cold and rainy here. I had a breakfast meeting in Broomfield this morning, followed by a 9:30 am meeting in Boulder; when I started my car to come back to Boulder the oil light came on, so a coworker drove me in. Without my [...]
Rocket Science
I watched the Deep Impact launch in the auditorium yesterday with a couple hundred other people (don’t anybody call the fire marshal), including a lot of spouses and kids visiting for the occasion. It was a beautiful launch.
Man, I love this job.
Things I don’t want to be reminded of
I remember going through this last year.
It’s a good day to pause for a moment and think kind thoughts about Laika, who gave her life to space research. Thanks (maybe) to Fazia for the reminder. More detail at Sven Grahn’s Space Place.
It’s not logical, but Laika’s fate upsets me so much whenever I think [...]
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