- For many years, NASA used the "better-smaller-faster-cheaper"
motto in the space program. That consumer-product like expression
was originated by scientist - turned- hatchet -man Dr. Daniel Goldin
(I call him "The Hammer.") After taking on his appointed
role as "NASA administrator" and touring most all of the agencies
facilities, he began laying people off en-masse. We're not talking
about a few hundred professionals here and there. His layoffs in the
agency are legendary even today - numbering several thousand
employees at a time.
-
- Few people outside the space agency realize that NASA
has facilities all over the country for researching all the specific scientific
disciplines required for spaceflight. For example, Stennis Space
Center has specialized in engine testing and development, and NASA Langley
has several wind tunnels to test aerodynamic design. (Who knows what the
fate of these facilities are today.) These are just two of many specialized facilities
NASA has across the United States.
-
- Why are so many different facilities needed? Spacecraft
launch vibrations are tremendous. And space is a VERY hostile environment.
Anything that can go wrong, always does.Yet Mr. Goldin determined
that there was too much redundancy at NASA, and began hacking away at the
precious tree of knowledge that took more than 50 years to grow. The
tree has roots reaching all the way back in time to operation paperclip.
Modern rocket science dates back to the 1930's with people like Goddard
and VonBraun. History has proven that The Hammer got carried away as
hatchet man extraordinaire, as proven by the many disasters that followed
under his leadership. He took great delight in boasting to the senate finance
committee live on CSPAN each year, his elimination of 1 billion
dollars annually from the NASA budget. Yet before his reign,
there were marvelous success stories like Voyager. It is still transmitting
data even today:
-
-
- ONE OF TWO VERY SUCCESSFUL VOYAGER SPACECRAFT
-
-
-
- THE VOYAGER RECORD DISC JACKET WITH VIDEO
AND SOUNDS OF EARTH AND LIFE
-
-
-
- We can thank The Hammer for several missions to
Mars which ended in disaster. It was a direct result of the massive
brain-drain. These were REAL engineers and designers. Just like there
are natural car mechanics that can diagnose a problem in seconds, these
engineers had the natural engineering instinct to design reliable,
working spacecraft. In fact, much of engineering is just plain
common sense. They also had proven track records after designing
and building Apollo, Mariner, Voyager and other highly successful spacecraft.
-
- THE LOWEST BIDDER
-
- John Glenn was asked, "As an astronaut, were you
comfortable placing your life in the hands of a government institution?
Glenn replied, "There's a joking comment someone once made, and I'll
paraphrase it, that it's a little disconcerting as an astronaut to know
that your spacecraft, and the rocket it's setting on, were built by the
lowest bidder working on a government contract. Seriously, I had every
confidence in Friendship 7. We knew that the United States had the best
minds working on the Mercury Project. All the pilots were closely involved
in the preparations for our flights"and that included input on the
craft itself. [7]
-
- WHAT WAS THAT OLD ENGINEER'S PHONE NUMBER AGAIN?
-
- NASA no longer had the real engineers with common
sense capabilities still aboard when trouble came knocking. When the rovers
on Mars almost ended in another failure, NASA was forced to bring
a few railroad-retired experts back to solve mission problems.
This fact was publicly revealed by NASA engineers on television in a NASA
press conference. Humility is a dish best served cold - just like revenge.
-
- Imagine what would have happened to the rover mission, if
these experts weren't available...
-
- THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM - NO MYSTERY
-
- Why is this incompetence rampant at NASA? Should
we not have MORE expertise and technology developed for space travel,
after more than 50 years of missions? The answer lies squarely in engineering
training at our "institutions of higher learning" and
the inadequacy everywhere therein. The engineering community in general
has become a discipline of what I call "mouse-pushers. Hands-on work
has almost disappeared, and has now been replaced with "simulation
software." We can't blame the college graduates for this, because
they only know what they've been taught.
-
- The problem lies squarely in the engineering curriculum at
today's institutions and the "video game mentality." There is
a lack of real hands-on experience even by our professors now teaching
course material. Common sense has left town on a rail, perhaps using a
one-way ticket. We better hope this isn't the case - because there are
engineers with the same mindset designing the world's nuclear reactors,
nuclear bombs, microwave ovens, etc....
-
- At least at one electrical engineering college (whose
name we won't mention here) no longer uses spectrum analyzers
in their curriculum. Like a multimeter or oscilloscope, this instrument is
another essential piece of equipment to verify some types of circuit
designs are functional. That's the "new way" of doing things.
Considering the endless revisions, bugs and problems that today's software
of all kinds have - including CAD software.
-
- Doesn't someone at NASA and in industry connect point
A to point B here and get the message? What does it take? A loss of a manned
space mission, such as the one being planned for Mars? Would you like to
be an astronaut on a spacecraft built both by the lowest bidder AND a complete
lack of common sense?
-
- WAS THE FORMER HEAD OF NASA A WHINER?
-
- When two Mar's missions failed, I heard the NASA
administrator (O'Keefe I think it was) state live on television, "It's
very difficult to design and build spacecraft to reach Mars." I ask
you Mr. O'Keefe - is it far easier to send spacecraft out past Pluto
that continue functioning for 30+ years instead? Are of us must
be missing the point here?
-
- Someone should have knuckle-knocked O'Keefe on the top
of the head and yelled "Hello? McFly? Hello! HELLO! We
already have made it OUTSIDE the solar system with technology designed
and built in the mid 70's. So why can't we get to Mars with every mission?
Isn't there something wrong with this picture?" Is this why
he's no longer the administrator?
-
- If you ever worked for a large corporation, then you
know what corporate culture is. And it exists at NASA, too. But changing
the top of the administration will accomplish nothing, when the problem
is deeply rooted in NASA culture and inadequate education from our "institutions
of higher learning." There are two major problems with the agency
that must be resolved BEFORE a real improvement in spacecraft reliability
happens.
-
- The Mariner missions made it to Mars without a problem
in the 70's. About 30 years has passed, and the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts functioned
far beyond their design lifetimes with no big problems. In fact, the designers
incorporated the ability to use new Reed-Solomon data encoding for imaging
data in the spacecraft's hardware. It was unused at launch, because the
engineers at the time stated that computer technology on earth were
not able to handle it yet. (Remember that Voyager was designed in the early
to mid 1970's.) Some years after the vehicles left earth, NASA sent commands
to each spacecraft to completely reconfigure the imaging system to
use the encoders via the data backup channel, thereby greatly increasing
video bandwidth. And it has worked just fine to this day. (If someone reading
this can get photos of the internal structures of Voyager, I'll see to
it they get on the data4science.net website.)
-
- Yet a disaster was the fate of many other missions
sent to Mars since Voyager. Genesis (see image below) was 'supposed' to
return samples of the solar wind to earth. It was to be captured in mid-air
by a helicopter, which also didn't work. Unfortunately it embedded
itself into the desert floor when returning to earth, completely contaminating
the collection panels. NASA put on a big theatrical performance to save
face announcing they felt they "could recover some solar wind samples
from the collection panels."
-
- Only a fool would believe such a lie (see the "AFTER"
picture below.) The pictures below show what it looked like before the
mission, and after soil contamination from attempting to kiss mother earth::
-
-
- BEFORE - GENESIS SPACECRAFT IN A CLEAN ROOM
BEFORE LAUNCH
-
-
-
- AND AFTER - GENESIS SPACECRAFT EMBEDDED IN THE
DESERT FLOOR AFTER FAILED RECOVERY
-
-
- MISSIONS LOST SINCE THE VOYAGER MISSIONS:
- CHALLENGER Shuttle (You know what happened)
- GENESIS 04 - Review in detail see [1]
- MARS OBSERVER 92 - Lost Contact [2]
- MARS 98 - Polar Lander - Lost contact during flight [3]
- MARS 98 - Climate Orbiter - Lost contact during flight
[4]
- COLUMBIA Shuttle (You know what happened)
-
- The two shuttle "mishaps" (the term NASA uses
to describe their monumental screw-ups) bracket this list like
a pair of book ends.
-
- Russia and Europe had their non-NASA mission disasters
since Voyager such as:
-
- * Loss of Phobos 1 and 2 from communication problems,
launched by the USSR in 1988 during flight.
- * Lost of Mars 96 mission - Orbit insertion failure
- * Loss of communication with Beagle Mars lander
by Eurospace agency in 2003.
-
- THOSE WHO DO NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY'S MISTAKES, ARE CONDEMNED
TO REPEAT THEM
-
- These missions all beg to ask the obvious question
- what was actually learned by the world's spacecraft engineers from
the highly successful and well-documented space missions?
- Missions such as Mariner, Apollo, Gemini, Voyager
and others? Did any of the space programs in Europe, the
former USSR or even NASA consider using proven space engineering in
their designs? Or did pride and arrogance get in the way? We already
know the answers to these questions, based on the results of various
space missions shown above. Perhaps there other administrators named
"McFly" need a knuckle-knocking on the top of the head.
-
- We nearly lost one of the NASA Mars rovers when NASA
uploaded a defective Java program "update" to one of the spacecraft.
The software was not properly tested and had bugs. This "minor
detail" came out in one of their infamous press conferences. Everyone
on earth knew how immature the Java programming language was at the
time.(It still is in my opinion.) It makes one wonder why NASA
would even consider using it with another mission at stake, and everyone
in Washington watching. Remember that this mission came after other mission
failures. The only thing that saved the rover was a re-boot of
the rover's operating system, which permitted a corrected software
upload to fix the problem.
-
- Retired engineers were brought in to assist in that recovery.
-
- IF IT THE MISSION WAS SUCCESSFUL? DESTROY IT!
-
-
- HUBBLE IN ORBIT
-
- Hubble is the groundbreaking telescope which let us see
to the edge of the universe and has provided thousands of high definition
images. Yet it may succumb to the economic ravages of Gulf
War, Act 2. It will be like most other government programs, where the "war
effort" has become more important than science, a soldier's health or
even future senior citizen's financial security. Can we expect a government
that poisons their own soldiers with DU, to save Hubble?
-
- Another reason that Hubble is planned to be scrapped,
is because of the use of adaptive optics in ground based telescopes.
Some anti-Hubble supporters are foolishly stating "astronomers can
obtain images on the ground as good as those in space." This is not
true, especially for viewing deep space objects in high detail. It
is well known that the atmosphere sharply filters out short ultraviolet,
X-rays and other important wavelengths. These wavelengths permit
astronomers to "see" previously invisible objects in the universe,
that cannot be observed from earth.
-
- For deep space astronomical observations, ground-based
telescopes with adaptive optics simply cannot function with light
that just isn't there.
-
- In all fairness, NASA in recent years has launched new
telescopes capable of imaging X-ray and ultraviolet light. These new instruments
like Chandra provide distant, relatively wide field images. When trying
to understand the structure of deep space objects, magnification is always
the key for helping to unlock such details. A large orbiting observatory
like Hubble provides the required magnification to see details of
deep space objects.
- Now let's look at adaptive optics. This is a key technology for
astronomy, and you will see later how important this is with regard to
Hubble.
-
- OPTICS (AO) - THE KEY TO MODERN TELESCOPES
-
- Light from any light source consists of countless individual
lightwaves.Each lightwave is always slightly different,
and will be distorted differently than a nearby lightwave near it.
It is not practical to correct each and every incoming lightwave for atmospheric
distortion. Adaptive Optics (AO) provides a working solution to the
problem, albeit on a macro scale.
-
- Let's look at a highly simplified explanation of how
this works. To get a basic understanding of this technology, visualize
looking at your computer monitor through a bundle of straws. Each part
of the screen you see through each straw consists of a small group
of lightwaves. We can call these small groups of lightwaves "bundles" for
purposes of discussion. Each of the wavy lines in the illustration
below, represents one of the bundles.
-
-
-
- SIMPLIFIED ADAPTIVE OPTICS SYSTEM [8]
-
-
- HOW IT WORKS
-
- Light enters the system in the upper left corner from
the object being viewed. It is sent to each camera using a
beamsplitter. The left camera "sees" the image in small, isolated
segments by using a micro-lens array. This consists of a plastic sheet
with typically 400 lenses per inch. The lens array causes small dots
of light on the CCD chip. This camera has no other lenses in front of the
CCD chip (as shown.) The video output is fed to the computer.
-
- In real time the computer analyzes the output from that
camera. The computer completes computations and sends control signals to
the mirror to change it's shape in microscopic amounts. It then examines
the left camera output to see if further correction is required. If
so it then makes further adjustments. The computer repeats the process
until it cannot be further improved. This is known as a "closed
loop" system since the computer can detect what effects mirror
changes have on the image. This is similar to how the auto-focus of an
SLR camera functions. The AO system corrects for atmospheric effects
(called "seeing effects") lens imperfections, etc...
-
- Light which passes straight through the beamsplitter
reaches the deformable mirror. Light reflected from mirror's corrected shape (brown
lines) passes through the focusing lenses before reaching the second
camera. This produces a high quality image of the object being
viewed, which is then presented on the TV monitor.
-
-
-
- MICRO-MACHINED, MICRO-CHIP SIZE DEFORMABLE
MIRROR 3.3mm x 3.3mm.
- THIS MIRROR IS SMALLER THAN THE END
OF A No. 2 PENCIL ERASER.
-
-
- AO permits Hubble to see out to the edge of
the universe. The system also cancels out imperfections from lens manufacturing. AO
technology is now employed at most of the larger observatories to greatly
improve images, to cancel out the effects of the atmosphere on lightwaves
coming from deep space objects. However, deformable mirrors only can
correct relatively large segments of an image, not individual lightwaves.
-
-
- A LIVING HUMAN RETINA SHOWING LIGHT
SENSITIVE CELLS (PHOTORECEPTORS.)
-
-
- Each photoceptor (called "cones") are
sensitve to either red, green or blue. A special imaging technique permits
capturing the particular color each photoreceptor responds to. The image
above covers an area of the retina of about 1 degree, which is about the
size of the period on the end of this sentence. All the above photoreceptors
you see above are inside that tiny area on the retina. There are approximately
100 million such color receptors in the human eye.
-
- AO is also widely employed in vision research of
the living human eye. It allows optical systems to correct for imperfections
in the lens of the eye. The system permits the lens of the eye to
be used as the final optical lens. Live photoreceptor cells on a living
human retina have been imaged as shown in the photo above. Each photoreceptor
is about 2 microns across (See photo above.) AO technology provides
approximately a 40% improvement in image quality.
-
- WHY HUBBLE IS STILL VALUABLE
-
- Let's return to the focus of this article.
It was necessary to review NASA successes and failures, and explain adaptive
optics to put Hubble's future into perspective. To replace Hubble,
astronomers are using numerous ground based telescopes around the
world focused on the same object in space. Both Hubble and ground-based
telescopes use AO to correct for atmospheric distortion (which is what
makes stars flicker at night.) One can see from Hubble images that
AO is very helpful in deep space imaging, even though it is not perfect.
-
- AO technology cannot correct for distortion in individual
beams of light that reach the camera. Observations on earth cannot replace
the space environment for Hubble, where no air is present to
distort the image. Air will also filter out many other important wavelengths
of light which are required to better understand deep space objects. Telescopes
on the ground working in unison require clear weather and atmospheric
conditions at several locations around the world. Each telescope's time must
be scheduled to look at one particular deep space object.
- As a parting thought, take a look at this marvelous
image of an exploding star captured by Hubble:
-
- For more detail about Hubble's imaging of
an exploding star see http://www.rense.com/general62/expp.htm
-
-
-
- CONCLUSION
-
- We must have a space program built upon the great successes
of the past. Engineering is an art - it must combine common sense with
physics, art and sound science into one discipline. A space mission can
result in disaster if any of these aspects are deficient. Arrogance and
pride have no place in any space program. There is only one chance to get
it right in deep space missions. There are no service calls. Instruments
like Hubble must go on and need to be recognized for their value. When
Hubble was retrofitted many years ago to correct an optics design problem,
a telephone booth sized module was installed while in orbit. Perhaps a
new module could be designed and installed to replace that one, to
explore the new shorter wavelengths. This could yield superior images to
anything obtainable on earth. Hubble never had a shortage of astronomers desiring
to use it.
-
- Ted Twietmeyer
- --------
-
- Ted Twietmeyer is a former defense and NASA contractor, engineer,
advanced science researcher and inventor, and holds a patent on parallel
optical backplane technology. He is also a frequent contributor
to rense.com, with a 20 year background in aerospace, defense systems and
instrumentation. Mr. Twietmeyer is also researching science topics largely
ignored by mainstream science, and all are designed for the public to participate
in at http://www.data4science.net
-
- LOST MARS MISSIONS
- [1] - Genesis 04 - http://www.rense.com/general58/egensis.htm
- [2] - Mars Observer 92 - http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/ceps/etp/mars/explore_missions.html
- [3] - Mars Polar Lander 98 - http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/index.html
- [4] - Mars Climate Observer 98 - http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/index.html
- [5] - Spacecraft photos - nasa.gov
- [6] - Vision research photos - http://www.cvs.rochester.edu/williamslab/cfao_roch.html
- [7] - John Glen's comments - http://dunamai.com/pastors_desk/failure_not_option.htm
- [8] - Simplified Adaptive optics illustration - Ted Twietmeyer
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