I'm back in the USA as of last evening. I've never been very successful at navigating jet lag when heading east. Going west, I have no problem: I usually just try to stay awake for the entire journey, then go to sleep the evening of my arrival at my destination. Usually, the only side effect is I tend to wake up one or two hours earlier than usual, which is actually a positive and productive side effect. But going east, I try to sleep on the plane for a few hours, and then stay awake until evening of my arrival at my destination. Sometimes this works; but sometimes (like last night), despite being absolutely exhausted, I still wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. Way too early to call it a morning and have a productive day (I'd likely be crashing by lunchtime). But by the time I get back to sleep, I either must awaken again very shortly or else sleep in and then have the cycle repeat the next night when I have trouble falling asleep at a reasonable hour.
I think it is because flying east is like travelling into the future, which violates the laws of entropy. You see, when flying east, you are accelerating the passage of the Sun (or the passage of the night) across the sky. And when you arrive, you will feel tired, but all external stimulus tells you that it is morning. But when flying west, you show down time, so you arrive slightly more tired than you should for the time of day; but it is still usually late in the day, so it does not confuse your body's internal clocks. Then again, I've never covered a distance of more than eight time zones on a single flight. Perhaps I would have a very different experience if I flew to Australia. Perhaps I am just talking gibberish; but I'll blame the jetlag. ;-)
Friday, December 11, 2015
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
After the gold rush
You have NO IDEA how long I have waited to use this title in this context. Let me explain. The word for Venus in Japanese is "kinsei," pronounced "keen say." In the Kanji writing system, this is represented as 金生。 The Japanese word for "Friday" is "kinyoubi," pronounced "keen yo bee." In Kanji, it is represented as 金曜日。 Those who know something of the Romance languages will notice the pattern; it holds for all seven days of the week and the "classical" planets in Japanese as well. Now, the one additional fact here is that the days of the week were established a long time ago in the oriental lands. But, they associated each with one of the seven natural elements (according to their ancient natural philosophy). 金 is the Kanji for "gold." Hence, one way of saying it is that Venus is the "gold planet" (or, if you want to be pedantic, the "gold star"). Today -- for me at least, as a participating scientist about to return home for a time -- we are beyond the hustle and bustle of the orbit insertion of Akatsuki around Venus; we have moved past the rush to Venus; we are now ... after the gold rush ... with all apologies to Neil Young.
This is not to say things have calmed down. The team are still working frantically to ensure that they can begin science operations before April. They have very much work still to do to. A process called "commissioning" the spacecraft, which involves adjusting the orbit to one that is conducive to achieving the science goals, running all of the instruments though a checkout procedure to ensure they are working properly (and fix any problems that may have arisen during the journey), calibrating the instruments so we know how much light each is receiving when we see an image, and testing the observation procedures that will be utilized in the coming years. I spoke briefly with Takeshi Imamura, the Akatsuki Project Scientist, yesterday evening. He apologized profusely for being unable to discuss science goals with me; but I understood that at that moment, I would be able to help best by offering again my congratulations and letting him do the work that he had to do right now.
This is not to say things have calmed down. The team are still working frantically to ensure that they can begin science operations before April. They have very much work still to do to. A process called "commissioning" the spacecraft, which involves adjusting the orbit to one that is conducive to achieving the science goals, running all of the instruments though a checkout procedure to ensure they are working properly (and fix any problems that may have arisen during the journey), calibrating the instruments so we know how much light each is receiving when we see an image, and testing the observation procedures that will be utilized in the coming years. I spoke briefly with Takeshi Imamura, the Akatsuki Project Scientist, yesterday evening. He apologized profusely for being unable to discuss science goals with me; but I understood that at that moment, I would be able to help best by offering again my congratulations and letting him do the work that he had to do right now.
Monday, December 7, 2015
On to business
I awoke this morning to the sounds of fighter jets screaming overhead above an overcast sky. It was a "subtle" reminder that JAXA-ISAS is only about 20 miles from the Yokota US Air Force base. I rushed outside into the brisk December morning air to collect a hot canned coffee from the vending machine downstairs before returning to my room to join the first telecon among the now official Venus Climate Orbiter (Akatsuki) Participating Scientist team.
I won't lie; it was a telecon, so it was pretty dull. But that does not mean there was not also tremendous excitement! Everybody was very upbeat about the success of the orbit insertion and the prospects of very much good science soon to come. We discussed the details of the VOI and the current orbit that have been learned in the meantime; and we briefly discussed our science plans. We are all looking forward to getting started and helping our Japanese colleagues to succeed in their endeavour.
The first step in this is a meeting involving all of the American and Japanese scientists and engineers on the team. This will happen after the Akatsuki team have begun to adjust their spacecraft's orbit to one that is more conducive to scientific observations. The orbit that was achieved has a very long period (about 14 days) that takes is very far from the planet (almost the same distance that the Moon is from the Earth). The instruments were designed to observe Venus from a much smaller distance. Akatsuki will not get quite as close as was originally planned (for the 2010 arrival); but the team will be able to get closer than they are now. By January, it is likely that we will either know the parameters of, or will be in, the final science orbit.
I am sure that I speak for the entire NASA Akatsuki Participating Scientist Team when I say:
私達は頑張ます。
I won't lie; it was a telecon, so it was pretty dull. But that does not mean there was not also tremendous excitement! Everybody was very upbeat about the success of the orbit insertion and the prospects of very much good science soon to come. We discussed the details of the VOI and the current orbit that have been learned in the meantime; and we briefly discussed our science plans. We are all looking forward to getting started and helping our Japanese colleagues to succeed in their endeavour.
The first step in this is a meeting involving all of the American and Japanese scientists and engineers on the team. This will happen after the Akatsuki team have begun to adjust their spacecraft's orbit to one that is more conducive to scientific observations. The orbit that was achieved has a very long period (about 14 days) that takes is very far from the planet (almost the same distance that the Moon is from the Earth). The instruments were designed to observe Venus from a much smaller distance. Akatsuki will not get quite as close as was originally planned (for the 2010 arrival); but the team will be able to get closer than they are now. By January, it is likely that we will either know the parameters of, or will be in, the final science orbit.
I am sure that I speak for the entire NASA Akatsuki Participating Scientist Team when I say:
私達は頑張ます。
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Congratuations to the Akatsuki Team!
おめでとうございます！
JAXA-ISAS had announced yesterday that, this morning, there would be telescopes set up to observe Venus, the Moon, and Mars, from 4:30am to 6am from the entrance area to the Sagamihara campus of JAXA. So, I awoke at 5am to see just what sort of turnout there would be. I was not wholly optimistic, since the clouds had begun to roll in the night before, and it was going to be 5am on a cold December morning.
So my surprise and admiration were substantial when I walked outside to see some 50 or more people gathered outside in the dark and cold to watch the Moon, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter slowly emerge from the thinning cloud cover. Some had come from as far away as Tokyo (two hours by train). One gentleman told us he had ridden his bicycle from Yokohama (also a two hour journey) the night before, and was going to ride home as dawn arrived in order to get to work on time!
Buoyed by this show of support and enthusiasm for what the Akatsuki team were trying to accomplish today, I headed to the Research Center Building to follow the VOI-R1 events. A dozen people already crowded the hallway looking through the glass window into the control room where two dozen scientists and engineers tracked and monitored the progress and status of Akatsuki. They were soon joined by another dozen onlookers in what quickly became a very crowded hallway as I wondered whether we were in violation of any fire codes! (I then wondered whether Japan even had fire codes). I tried peering over the shoulders an between the bodies of several team members who were clustered around the computer screen that read "DELTA-V モニタール," or "delta-V monitor." It was there that the action was going to occur, so I was happy when the team began to project the view of that monitor onto the wall. As the moment arrived when the light travel time from Venus to Earth first brought the news of the acceleration of Akatsuki to the control room via the Usuda radio antenna near Nagano, we watched the delta-V curve edge ever so slightly above zero. The burn had begun and we had evidence that the thrusters were firing!
As the burn continued, we watched as the delta-v increased in magnitude. There were half a dozen additional lines drawn on the graph, showing what the delta-v curve would look like if the burn stopped unexpectedly at 15% of nominal, 30%, 50%, 70%, 80%, 90% and 100%. I asked Takehiko Satoh, leader of the IR2 camera team, what percentage of nominal was required to ensure orbit capture. He told me that 90% would mean we were most likely in orbit. We watched pensively as the delta-v curve rose above each of the sub-nominal curves. Once it reached 90%, we knew that, at the very least, Akatsuki was going to stay with Venus this time. But we were not able to relax yet. The curve continued to rise, and in fact appeared to rise even above the 100% line. The Akatsuki Team gave 110% effort for five years to rescue their spacecraft, and now it appeared as though the spacecraft was returning the favor! In actuality, it is likely that there was either a small uncertainty in the acceleration efficiency, or burn efficiency, or mass of the spacecraft, or direction of the directed thrust, or several other possibilities. Further data from the spacecraft will be needed to determine that; but it doesn't matter for now, as the entire room (and our little hallway) bursts into applause as Akatsuki Project Director Masato Nakamura announces at a little before 9:20am, JST, that Akatsuki has been successfully inserted into orbit around Venus.
The relief in the faces of the Akastuki team members is so apparent that we onlookers can feel it as well. But the work has not yet finished. Takeshi Imamura speeds out of the control room, stopping only for a moment to accept our offers of congratulations for the successful VOI, and to inform us that he must work on developing a new set of commands for the commissioning orbit, as the team discovered an error and needed to correct it for the next upload of data. The work also is just beginning for all of the scientists involved, both in Japan and the United States.
The afternoon ended with a champagne toast to the success of Akatsuki. Sharing the moment with us, in spirit, was the engineer who had rescued Japan's earlier Nozomi spacecraft from a failed Earth-Mars transfer orbit. He also was very instrumental in the early formative years of the Akatsuki mission, before dying at the young age of 50. We raised our paper cups and shouted "Kampai!"
JAXA-ISAS had announced yesterday that, this morning, there would be telescopes set up to observe Venus, the Moon, and Mars, from 4:30am to 6am from the entrance area to the Sagamihara campus of JAXA. So, I awoke at 5am to see just what sort of turnout there would be. I was not wholly optimistic, since the clouds had begun to roll in the night before, and it was going to be 5am on a cold December morning.
So my surprise and admiration were substantial when I walked outside to see some 50 or more people gathered outside in the dark and cold to watch the Moon, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter slowly emerge from the thinning cloud cover. Some had come from as far away as Tokyo (two hours by train). One gentleman told us he had ridden his bicycle from Yokohama (also a two hour journey) the night before, and was going to ride home as dawn arrived in order to get to work on time!
Buoyed by this show of support and enthusiasm for what the Akatsuki team were trying to accomplish today, I headed to the Research Center Building to follow the VOI-R1 events. A dozen people already crowded the hallway looking through the glass window into the control room where two dozen scientists and engineers tracked and monitored the progress and status of Akatsuki. They were soon joined by another dozen onlookers in what quickly became a very crowded hallway as I wondered whether we were in violation of any fire codes! (I then wondered whether Japan even had fire codes). I tried peering over the shoulders an between the bodies of several team members who were clustered around the computer screen that read "DELTA-V モニタール," or "delta-V monitor." It was there that the action was going to occur, so I was happy when the team began to project the view of that monitor onto the wall. As the moment arrived when the light travel time from Venus to Earth first brought the news of the acceleration of Akatsuki to the control room via the Usuda radio antenna near Nagano, we watched the delta-V curve edge ever so slightly above zero. The burn had begun and we had evidence that the thrusters were firing!
As the burn continued, we watched as the delta-v increased in magnitude. There were half a dozen additional lines drawn on the graph, showing what the delta-v curve would look like if the burn stopped unexpectedly at 15% of nominal, 30%, 50%, 70%, 80%, 90% and 100%. I asked Takehiko Satoh, leader of the IR2 camera team, what percentage of nominal was required to ensure orbit capture. He told me that 90% would mean we were most likely in orbit. We watched pensively as the delta-v curve rose above each of the sub-nominal curves. Once it reached 90%, we knew that, at the very least, Akatsuki was going to stay with Venus this time. But we were not able to relax yet. The curve continued to rise, and in fact appeared to rise even above the 100% line. The Akatsuki Team gave 110% effort for five years to rescue their spacecraft, and now it appeared as though the spacecraft was returning the favor! In actuality, it is likely that there was either a small uncertainty in the acceleration efficiency, or burn efficiency, or mass of the spacecraft, or direction of the directed thrust, or several other possibilities. Further data from the spacecraft will be needed to determine that; but it doesn't matter for now, as the entire room (and our little hallway) bursts into applause as Akatsuki Project Director Masato Nakamura announces at a little before 9:20am, JST, that Akatsuki has been successfully inserted into orbit around Venus.
The relief in the faces of the Akastuki team members is so apparent that we onlookers can feel it as well. But the work has not yet finished. Takeshi Imamura speeds out of the control room, stopping only for a moment to accept our offers of congratulations for the successful VOI, and to inform us that he must work on developing a new set of commands for the commissioning orbit, as the team discovered an error and needed to correct it for the next upload of data. The work also is just beginning for all of the scientists involved, both in Japan and the United States.
The afternoon ended with a champagne toast to the success of Akatsuki. Sharing the moment with us, in spirit, was the engineer who had rescued Japan's earlier Nozomi spacecraft from a failed Earth-Mars transfer orbit. He also was very instrumental in the early formative years of the Akatsuki mission, before dying at the young age of 50. We raised our paper cups and shouted "Kampai!"
Good Luck Akatsuki!
On the evening of December 7 in 2010, I sat myself in a big-box bookstore with free WiFi in order to follow the progress of Akatsuki-kun as he approached his goal, Kinsei-chan (Venus), after a nearly seven month journey from Earth. Akatsuki, or the Venus Climate Orbiter mission of Japan had been my goal for several years. Early in my career as a graduate student studying the Venus clouds, I became aware of this planned Japanese planetary mission and quickly learned that their primary mission goals and intended mission instrumentation meshed very well with my research goals and objectives. I spent the next several years working to ensure that I could play a role in helping our Japanese partners to explore Venus and its atmosphere. I went so far as to begin to learn some Japanese so that I could more easily communicate with the mission team when the time came. I was very fortunate to be selected by NASA as a participating scientist in residence at ISAS (essentially, JAXA's version of JPL). I was looking forward to working with the scientists I had gotten to know over the previous few years, and to working with spacecraft imagery data that seemed designed specifically for the questions I had been pursuing in my research for nearly a decade.
Unfortunately, that day, Akatsuki's main engine suffered a malfunction which caused the spacecraft to shut down the burn that was intended to place it into orbit around Venus. It quickly became clear that there would not be new observational data coming from Akatsuki over the succeeding few years as the spacecraft wound up orbiting the Sun instead of Venus, because it was unable to slow down sufficiently to be captured into orbit by Venus. Within days NASA called me and the other participating scientists to let us know that we were no longer participating scientists and that our program would not be financially supported (it was just as well, it would have been difficult to achieve what we had proposed to do since there were no data to analyze). However, soon after, JAXA announced that they might be able to make a second attempt at orbit insertion ... between five and seven years later.
Well, it is now five years later (to the day), and the wizards at JAXA have managed just that. Tomorrow, 7 December 2015, from 0851 to 1130 Japan Standard Time (1651 to 1930, Mountain Standard Time, but it will be the evening of the 6th, there) the Akatsuki team will be following the result of years of effort as they monitor the second orbit insertion attempt of their spacecraft, this time using attitude control thrusters. If the main rocket engine had a kick like turning on a fire hose, then the attitude control thrusters would be like eight water pistols. The physics is the same, you just need to work a lot longer for the same amount of acceleration.
This time, however, I am very fortunate again, as I have had the opportunity to follow the proceedings from ISAS itself! On this last day before VOI-R1 (JAXA's name for this second orbit insertion attempt), the team are running around, working very hard, and very long hours. But, one can easily see the mix of cautious optimism and bone-deep fatigue that results from a determination to succeed combined with the awareness of all possible failure modes that need to be prepared for. I hope that tomorrow morning, I can join them in an exuberant celebration of the culmination of a many years long journey that will make my 25-hour journey to get here pale by comparison.
あかつきチーム、頑張ってください！
Unfortunately, that day, Akatsuki's main engine suffered a malfunction which caused the spacecraft to shut down the burn that was intended to place it into orbit around Venus. It quickly became clear that there would not be new observational data coming from Akatsuki over the succeeding few years as the spacecraft wound up orbiting the Sun instead of Venus, because it was unable to slow down sufficiently to be captured into orbit by Venus. Within days NASA called me and the other participating scientists to let us know that we were no longer participating scientists and that our program would not be financially supported (it was just as well, it would have been difficult to achieve what we had proposed to do since there were no data to analyze). However, soon after, JAXA announced that they might be able to make a second attempt at orbit insertion ... between five and seven years later.
Well, it is now five years later (to the day), and the wizards at JAXA have managed just that. Tomorrow, 7 December 2015, from 0851 to 1130 Japan Standard Time (1651 to 1930, Mountain Standard Time, but it will be the evening of the 6th, there) the Akatsuki team will be following the result of years of effort as they monitor the second orbit insertion attempt of their spacecraft, this time using attitude control thrusters. If the main rocket engine had a kick like turning on a fire hose, then the attitude control thrusters would be like eight water pistols. The physics is the same, you just need to work a lot longer for the same amount of acceleration.
This time, however, I am very fortunate again, as I have had the opportunity to follow the proceedings from ISAS itself! On this last day before VOI-R1 (JAXA's name for this second orbit insertion attempt), the team are running around, working very hard, and very long hours. But, one can easily see the mix of cautious optimism and bone-deep fatigue that results from a determination to succeed combined with the awareness of all possible failure modes that need to be prepared for. I hope that tomorrow morning, I can join them in an exuberant celebration of the culmination of a many years long journey that will make my 25-hour journey to get here pale by comparison.
あかつきチーム、頑張ってください！
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)