A Summer Vacation Tracking Down UFOs
Erin Schumacher's summer job for NASA was to look for UFOs. Erin is a 16-year-old high school student from Redondo Beach, California, attending the California Academy of Mathematics and Science in Carson. She was one of ten students selected to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena as part of the Summer High School Apprenticeship Research Program, or SHARP.
But is studying UFOs a useful kind of NASA research? Well, it is when they are "unidentified flashing objects" that appear in certain images of Earth from space. Erin worked with scientists on the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer MISR) project to track down these mysterious features. MISR is one of five instruments onboard the Earth-orbiting Terra satellite. MISR's nine separate cameras all point downward at different angles, each camera in turn taking a picture of the same piece of Earth as the satellite passes overhead. Viewing the same scene through the atmosphere at different angles gives far more information about the aerosols, pollution, and water vapor in the air than a single view would give. Ground features may also look slightly or dramatically different from one viewing angle to another.
Erin's job was to carefully examine the pictures looking for any flashes of light that might be visible from just one of the nine angles. Such flashes are caused by sunlight bouncing off very reflective surfaces and can be seen if a camera is pointed at just the right angle to catch them. Because the satellite data contain precise locations for each pixel in the images, Erin could figure out exactly where a flashing object on the ground should be. Her job was then to figure out exactly what it was that made the flash-in particular, to see if she could distinguish man-made objects from natural ones.
When Erin began working at JPL, scientists on the MISR project had already identified two large flashes out in the middle of the Mojave Desert in Southern California. These turned out to be from solar power generating stations. Soon, Erin began finding flashes all over the place. She learned how to apply her math knowledge to figuring out how the objects would have to be oriented in order to be seen by a particular MISR camera. One time, she and a team of MISR scientists and students went on a field trip to the exact locations of some flashes, where they found greenhouses, large warehouses with corrugated metal roofs, a glass-enclosed shopping mall, and a solar-paneled barn. For some flashes, they could find nothing at all. Those remain "UFOs" to this day!
Learn more about Earth science applications of MISR at www-misr.jpl.nasa.gov. Kids can do an online MISR crossword at spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/misr_xword/misr_xword1.shtml.
This article was written by Diane K. Fisher. It was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Caption:
Two cameras on MISR made these images of the same part of the Mojave Desert. The camera pointed at an angle of 26 forward saw the flashes from two solar electric power generating stations. These objects are nearly invisible at the other angle.
Waiting for Cassini's "Safe Arrival" Call
The evening of June 30, 2004, was nail-biting time at Cassini Mission Control. After a seven-year journey that included gravity assist flybys of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter, Cassini had finally arrived at Saturn. A 96-minute burn of its main engine would slow it down enough to be captured into orbit by Saturn's powerful gravitational field. Too short a burn and Cassini would keep going toward the outer reaches of the solar system. Too long a burn and the orbit would be too close and fuel reserves exhausted.
According to Dave Doody, a Cassini Mission Controller at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, there was a good chance the Earth-bound Cassini crew would have to wait hours to learn whether or not the burn was successful. Of the three spacecraft-tracking Deep Space Network (DSN) complexes around the globe, the complex in Canberra, Australia, was in line to receive Cassini's signal shortly after the beginning of the burn. However, winds of up to 90 kilometers per hour had been forecast. In such winds, the DSN's huge dish antennas must be locked into position pointed straight up and cannot be used to track a tiny spacecraft a billion miles away as Earth turns on its axis. "The winds never came," notes Doody.
The DSN complex at Goldstone, California, was tracking the carrier signal from Cassini's low-gain antenna (LGA) when the telltale Doppler shift in the LGA signal was seen, indicating the sudden deceleration of the spacecraft from the successful ignition of the main engine. Soon thereafter, however, Goldstone rotated out of range and Canberra took the watch.
After completion of the burn, Cassini was programmed to make a 20-second "call home" using its high-gain antenna (HGA). Although this HGA signal would contain detailed data on the health of the spacecraft, mission controllers would consider it a bonus if any of that data were actually captured. Mostly, they just wanted to see the increase in signal strength to show the HGA was pointed toward Earth and be able to determine the spacecraft's speed from the Doppler data. If possible, they also wanted to try to lock onto the signal with DSN's closed-loop receiver, a necessary step for extracting engineering data.
Normally it takes around one minute to establish a lock on the HGA signal once a DSN station rotates into range. Having only 20 second's worth of signal to work with, the DSN not only established a lock within just a few seconds, but extracted a considerable amount of telemetry during the remaining seconds.
"The DSN people bent over backwards to get a lock on that telemetry signal. And they weren't just depending on the technology. They really know how to get flawless performance out of it. They were awesome," remarks Doody.
Find out more about the DSN from JPL's popular training document for mission controllers, Basics of Space Flight (www.jpl.nasa.gov/basics) and the DSN website at deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn. For details of the Cassini Saturn orbit insertion, see www.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/soi. Kids can check out The Space Place at spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/dsn_fact1.shtml to learn about the amazing ability of the DSN antennas to detect the tiniest spacecraft signals.
This article was written by Diane K. Fisher. It was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Caption:
Right after entering Saturn orbit, Cassini sent this image of the part of the Encke Gap in Saturn's rings. Image credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.