JPL BLOGS
Inside Views on Outer Space
Hear from scientists, engineers and other experts as they offer a fascinating look at JPL missions, science and history.
Slice of History | December 1, 2015
Morris Dam Test Facility - 1943
In 1943, JPL was under contract with the Army Air Corps to design, build and test an underwater solid rocket motor. Early tests were done in a large trough of water to see if a solid propellant would fire underwater ... and it did. Field tests were conducted in 1943 at the Morris Dam Test Facility in an artificial lake 25 miles from Pasadena, California. The facility was part of Caltech’s “other” rocket project, funded by the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development – an agency set up to support and coordinate war-related research.
This photo shows a barge, which was anchored to trees on the shore of the lake, with an underwater structure that would hold the motor at a depth of one to six feet during testing. Two motion-picture cameras (one color, and one black and white) filmed the ten tests. The test motors were loaded with two different propellant formulas (GALCIT 53 and GALCIT 54).
JPL had a growing need for its own underwater test facility, so construction began on a hydrodynamic tank, or towing channel, in September 1943. It was located in the space currently occupied by the parking structure and part of Arroyo Road. An Army Air Forces contract for $121,000 – for development of a hydrobomb design – began in September 1944.
This post was written for “Historical Photo of the Month,” a blog by Julie Cooper of JPL’s Library and Archives Group.
TAGS: HISTORY, TECHNOLOGY, ROCKETS
Earth Right Now | October 6, 2015
Satellites, Ships, Planes and Yes, It’s True: NASA Has Balloons, Too!
Those of you who follow this blog know that, on top of launching satellites into space, NASA has a suite of Earth-observing instruments, a robust airborne program of instruments mounted on planes, and science ships.
Final frontier? I don't think so. Our catch phrase should be more like "Frontiers are us." We're all over the place.
Recently, Chris Mertens, a NASA scientist interested in galactic cosmic rays, shepherded a NASA balloon all the way to the top of Earth's atmosphere. The balloon, which stood a couple hundred feet tall and held 11 million cubic feet of helium, had a flight train attached to it with a payload of four science instruments and a parachute. He watched it lift off from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and float away on a 24-hour research journey. "It was pretty surreal seeing it drift vertically away," he told me. "The apparatus looked big in the flight facility but looked so small as it was going up. It floated so gracefully, effortlessly."
Up, up and away
As the balloon lifted off, chief engineer Amanda Cutright could hear two sets of cheers, one at the location and a second over the delay at NASA's Langley Research Center where members of the team were watching a broadcast of the event. But she was "still holding her breath," waiting for the data to come in.
Mertens and Cutright, along with project manager Kevin Daugherty and the rest of the Radiation Dosimetry Experiment (RaD-X) team, had spent the past few weeks prepping the balloon and payload in the deserts of New Mexico and had been anxiously awaiting its launch. (Dosimetry is the science of determining radiation dosages received by the human body.) Daugherty told me they'd been waiting for the winds to stagnate in the upper atmosphere so they could fly over the southeastern U.S. for 24 hours without going into the populated areas of Mexico or Los Angeles.
Up in the air
The project actually began years ago when Mertens heard a pilot say, "I'm exposed to radiation and I don't know how much." See, someone on a one-way plane trip from Chicago to Germany on a normal day is exposed to approximately one chest X-ray's worth of radiation. Because commercial airline pilots and aircrew fly so frequently, they are actually radiation workers. So, with his background in cosmic radiation and space weather physics, Mertens knew he could develop a model to predict the radiation levels in Earth's upper atmosphere and answer that question. With this balloon flight, the RaD-X team expects to learn more about the amount of radiation flight crews receive on a daily, monthly or yearly basis and throughout their careers.
Up, up, up, up
A view of the edge of space from RaD-X onboard camera.
About two hours after launch, the balloon reached the middle of the stratosphere, about 110-120 thousand feet up, right on the edge of space. That's about three times as high as commercial airplanes normally fly. From on-board cameras, "we could see the curvature of the Earth and watch the clouds recede," said Cutright. The team wanted to look at the incoming galactic cosmic rays and radiation from the sun above the region where the particles interact with the atmosphere and break up into smaller particles. "Earth's radiation environment is complex," Mertens explained. "Our magnetic field has a dynamic response to the solar wind and varies with latitude. At the polar regions, radiation exposure is maximum because the magnetic field lines are vertical. This means that during a solar storm, the incoming charged particles at the polar cap are parallel to the magnetic field lines, so there's no deflection by the magnetic field."
Yes, Earth's magnetic field is seriously rad.
The sun's magnetic storms approaching Earth's magnetosphere. The white lines represent the solar wind; the purple line is the bow shock line; and the blue lines surrounding the Earth represent its protective magnetosphere. Isn't the magnetosphere rad? Image credit: Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
Just past sunset, they purposely let enough helium out of the balloon to lower it to the 70-89 thousand foot range and have it float there overnight. All four dosimetry instruments collected data at both altitudes to feed into NAIRAS, an analytical model that simulates tissue and how radiation impacts it.
For the rest of the flight, the RaD-X team watched visuals from the onboard cameras, gathered near real-time data on their computers and tracked the balloon flight path from the control room.
"At one point late at night," said Cutright, "we were watching the Earth and we could see the moon. We could see a lightning storm over Oklahoma, all the way from the edge of Texas and New Mexico."
After sunrise, the team watched the parachute deploy so the payload could descend safely; from the camera view, they watched the Earth getting bigger and bigger. The payload was cut from the balloon and a large hole ripped on the side of the balloon so it could fall on its own off to the side. The balloon landed in a rancher's field and the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility out of NASA Wallops recovered it.
Thank you for reading and for your comments.
Laura
P.S. 100 low-cost Cubes in Space experiments from 100 classrooms across the country were also on the flight. Some of their experiments included kernels of popcorn to see if they pop at altitude and seeds and electronics to find out how radiation affects them. Now that you know NASA helped students send kernels of popcorn to the edge of space, aren't you dying to find out if they popped or not? I am. I'll try my best to find out and post it here.
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TAGS: BALLOON, RADIATION, EARTH, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY
Slice of History | September 30, 2015
High Gain Antenna Tower - 1962
In the early 1960s, Mesa Road at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had not yet been built. Access to buildings on the mesa, like the High Gain Antenna Tower in this photo, was through the residential neighborhood north of JPL.
The antenna tower was built at the end of 1961, and was used by the Telecommunications Division in testing prototypes and various configurations of Deep Space Network antenna equipment. The platform was designed to reduce ground reflections from the sides and bottom of the adjacent canyon.
This post was written for “Historical Photo of the Month,” a blog by Julie Cooper of JPL’s Library and Archives Group.
TAGS: DSN, TECHNOLOGY, HISTORY
Slice of History | September 1, 2015
Echo Station Control Room - April 1962
This April 1962 photo of Deep Space Station 12 (DSS-12) in Goldstone, California, was featured in Space Programs Summary 37-15, Volume 3–The Deep Space Instrumentation Facility. The 85-foot (26-meter) Echo antenna can be seen through the window of the control room, and three unidentified men are at the controls. The Echo site was named for its support of Project Echo, an experiment that transmitted voice communications coast to coast by bouncing signals off the surface of a passive balloon-type satellite. The antenna was moved six miles in June 1962 to the Venus site (DSS-13) and in 1979 it was extended to 34 meters in diameter.
The bimonthly Space Programs Summary, or SPS, is an excellent source of information about JPL missions and related research from February 1959 to October 1970. In 1970, the SPS series was replaced by the Technical Reports (32-1 to 32-1606) and other report series.
This post was written for “Historical Photo of the Month,” a blog by Julie Cooper of JPL’s Library and Archives Group.
TAGS: DEEP SPACE NETWORK, SPACE COMMUNICATION, TECHNOLOGY, HISTORY
Slice of History | July 31, 2015
Inspection Tour - December 1954
In December 1954, only a few months after becoming the director of JPL, Dr. William Pickering (in the light-colored suit) hosted a visit by Frank H. Higgins, assistant secretary of the Army, and several members of his military entourage. At that time, JPL was under contract to Army Ordnance to develop guided missiles. In this photo, the group is gathered in the control room of the 20-inch wind tunnel. Frank Goddard (in the dark suit), chief of the Supersonic Aerodynamics Division, assisted with the tour and Bud Schurmeier, manager of the Wind Tunnel Section, observed from the back of the room while technicians conducted a demonstration.
This post was written for “Historical Photo of the Month,” a blog by Julie Cooper of JPL’s Library and Archives Group.
TAGS: TECHNOLOGY, HISTORY, DEEP SPACE NETWORK
Slice of History | July 1, 2015
Mechanical Coordinate Converter - September 1960
In the early 1960s, a computer known as a coordinate converter was part of the instrumentation and equipment used to position the Deep Space Network, or DSN, antennas. This photograph from September 1960 shows a mechanical coordinate converter. The device converted azimuth-elevation position information to hour angle-declination and vice versa. It was able to coordinate two or more tracking antennas that used different coordinate systems for their pointing. It was likely used in early tracking studies of missiles and spacecraft, and as a visual backup for later antenna operations.
Patent US 3163935A lists JPL employee Richard M. Beckwith as the inventor of this instrument. In 1962, Beckwith was a designer with the Guidance and Control Design Group. The photo appears in the photo album for Communications Engineering and Operations, the JPL organization that managed the DSN antennas.
This post was written for “Historical Photo of the Month,” a blog by Julie Cooper of JPL’s Library and Archives Group.
TAGS: TECHNOLOGY, HISTORY, DEEP SPACE NETWORK
Slice of History | April 2, 2015
Cassegrain Studies - January 1962
In the early 1960s, a new large-aperture, low-noise Advanced Antenna System was in its planning and early development stages for the Deep Space Instrumentation Facility (later known as the Deep Space Network). Compared with the 85-ft (26-meter) antennas then in use, the new antenna was to give a 10-decibel performance increase, with an order of magnitude increase in the data rate from future spacecraft. Feasibility studies and testing were conducted by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and subcontractors for various technologies and antenna components.
This January 1962 photo shows a 960-mc one-tenth scale Cassegrain antenna feed system study for the Advanced Antenna System. The objective was to establish the electrical performance capabilities and operational feasibility of this type of feed system for large antennas. The mount of the test system was covered with epoxy fiberglass and polystyrene foam to limit reflection of energy during testing.
A 210-foot (64-meter) antenna, using the new technology and designs, was built at the Goldstone site in California and became operational in 1966. The antenna, DSS 14, became known as the Mars antenna when it was used to track the Mariner 4 spacecraft. It was later upgraded to 70 meters in order to track Voyager 2 as it reached Neptune.
This post was written for “Historical Photo of the Month,” a blog by Julie Cooper of JPL’s Library and Archives Group.
TAGS: HISTORY, DEEP SPACE NETWORK, VOYAGER, MARINER, MARS, NEPTUNE, TECHNOLOGY
Slice of History | February 2, 2015
Lunar Roving Vehicle Prototype
In 1964, at least two companies were working under contract to JPL on a Surveyor Lunar Roving Vehicle Study: Bendix Corporation Systems Division, and General Motors Corporation Defense Research Laboratories. This photo shows a prototype General Motors rover, one of several different approaches that were studied to determine their capabilities, limitations, and their impact on overall spacecraft design and performance. Twelve different spacecraft configurations were studied in detail, with variations in weight, power systems, communication method, and spaceframe size.
The final design of the Surveyor 1 through 7 lunar landers did not include a rover. NASA sponsored other lunar rover studies during the 1960s, with a variety of sizes and technical capabilities, and Apollo 15 astronauts became the first to drive a Lunar Roving Vehicle on the moon, during their 1971 mission. JPL continued to develop robotic spacecraft and rovers and, in 1997, landed Mars Pathfinder and its Sojourner rover on the red planet.
This post was written for “Historical Photo of the Month,” a blog by Julie Cooper of JPL’s Library and Archives Group.
TAGS: HISTORY, MOON, SPACECRAFT, TECHNOLOGY, ROVER
Slice of History | December 31, 2014
Sphere Drag Experiment
In 1962, JPL conducted research in low-density gas dynamics, studying the drag on a sphere in a supersonic low-density flow environment, at various temperatures and speeds (Mach 1.8 to 4.4). Experiments were conducted in JPL’s Low Density Wind Tunnel. Nozzles were wrapped in a copper coil containing liquid nitrogen to cool the apparatus. A steel or bronze ball from 1/32 to 1/8 inch in size was suspended from fine tungsten wire in the jet. Two 8 mm movie projector lamps with built-in reflectors were placed at the edge of the jet and used to raise the sphere temperature to about 1,000 kelvins.
This post was written for “Historical Photo of the Month,” a blog by Julie Cooper of JPL’s Library and Archives Group.
TAGS: HISTORY, TECHNOLOGY
Slice of History | December 1, 2014
Mariner 3 Systems Test Configuration
Several spacecraft were built for the Mariner Mars 1964 mission. The ones that were actually launched were referred to as Mariner C-2 and Mariner C-3 until they were renamed Mariner 3 and Mariner 4, respectively. There was also a Proof Test Model (PTM, or Mariner C-1) and a Structural Test Model (STM). This photo shows Mariner C-2 configured for system tests in May 1964. It appears to be in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility, with the observation area at the top of the photo.
Mariner 3 was launched November 5, 1964, but the shroud did not fully eject from the spacecraft, the solar panels did not deploy, and the batteries ran out of power. The problem was fixed on Mariner 4, which began its successful journey to Mars on November 28, 1964.
Documentation found in the Archives does not identify the purpose of the sphere covering the magnetometer during this test.
This post was written for “Historical Photo of the Month,” a blog by Julie Cooper of JPL’s Library and Archives Group.TAGS: HISTORY, MARINER, MARS, VENUS, SOLAR SYSTEM, MISSION, SPACECRAFT, TECHNOLOGY