Making a 'carbon copy' of a spacecraft
The worst of moments, and something over which you have absolutely no control.
That was how the team behind Nasa's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) were feeling on this day last year.
OCO was designed to make unprecedented global measurements of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.
We all saw the spacecraft climb into the night sky above Vandenberg Air Force Base in California...but minutes later, it was heading back to Earth to be dumped in the ocean near Antarctica. Its rocket had malfunctioned.
The Taurus vehicle's clamshell fairing protecting the satellite in flight had failed to separate at the designated time.
The vehicle and OCO were therefore too heavy and travelling too slowly [PDF 1Mb] to make orbit.
Talking to me this week, OCO's principal investigator Dave Crisp is philosophical about the whole thing:
"Knowing that the thing you've laboured over with love is sitting on top of 100 tons of high explosive - that is a rocket - is something that if it doesn't generate a little bit of anxiety, then you're not breathing. This is one of the most dangerous things we still do in space. The launch is still a high-risk endeavour. We all know that going into it and we all look forward to getting it over with."
Dr Crisp is a lot happier today knowing that President Obama would like to re-build OCO.
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In his Nasa FY2011 budget request this month, the president specifically mentioned funds for an OCO-2.
Indeed, in all the hullabaloo over the cancellation of the Ares "Moon rockets", little comment was made about the considerable increase in funding requested for Earth science at Nasa.
Mr Obama is calling for an Earth science budget [PDF 1Mb] at the US space agency in 2011 of $1.8bn, an increase of $300m.
Also, the budget is expected to rise to $2.2bn by 2015. This would implement and accelerate a suite of missions - including the follow-ons to Icesat, which has just failed, and to the "gravity twins" known as Grace which I've written so much about in recent years.
The budget papers released by the White House make the bold claim that engineering considerations, not money, will determine launch schedules.
The OCO team is meeting with Nasa management in Washington DC on the anniversary of its loss to plan a "carbon copy" of the first observatory.
If the team later receives confirmation of its proposal, the new OCO-2 venture would formally kick off in October this year, with the aim of getting the re-built satellite to the launch pad in February 2013.
We're thinking here in Europe right now about a very similar case - that of Cryosat-2, the ice monitoring satellite. Cryosat-1 was also destroyed on launch, in 2005. It was re-commissioned and re-built; and the new satellite is now just a few weeks from making its bid for orbit.
Rebuilding is not always a straightforward process. The OCO team is already aware of an issue that confronted Cryosat-2 - namely that some of the parts you need to make your carbon copy are no longer available.
This will necessitate some elements to be redesigned.
But just as with Cryosat-2, OCO-2 science will benefit from the extra years the team has to learn how to handle the data when it eventually comes back to Earth.
For example, the OCO team has been working hand in glove with the Japanese Gosat mission which is also studying greenhouse gases. Dave Crisp:
"The Gosat team adopted us, literally within a week of the loss of our satellite. We'd already been working with them for about four years to try to refine the validation and calibration capabilities of both groups. We're now getting their full data stream pretty much as it's produced. We're analysing it; and the really neat thing about that is it's helping us to validate the algorithms to analyse the OCO data when it becomes available. And we think that because of that, our data should be available a lot sooner than it would have been for the first OCO mission. That will be a big benefit to everybody."
I'll speak more to Cryosat-2 in the coming weeks. I was in the European Space Agency's "mission control" in Darmstadt, Germany, last week as they were preparing for the upcoming launch.
Currently, engineers are having to address a technical issue related to the performance of the second stage of Cryosat-2's rocket, which is a converted ICBM. Once that's resolved, the carbon copy of Europe's first ice mapping satellite will be ready to go.
Watch this space.
I’m 
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~43~RS~)
Comments
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Hundreds of millions of dollars and the boffins underestimated the amount of power needed to get the craft into orbit. Not even a schoolkid would make that mistake.
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Vic B-W I suggest you re-read the blog carefully. I think you missed the bit about the fairing not separating from the booster.
Not even a school kid would make that mistake!
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TO Vic B-W:
Read the article... the fairing failed to separate, that's why the rocket had not enough thrust to get to orbital velocity. Don't make irrelevant comments please.. If you don't understand this 'detail' mirror your comment to yourself..
Cheers
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To Vic B-W, from reading the article, the boffins did not underestimate the amount of power needed.
Quote:
"The Taurus vehicle's clamshell fairing protecting the satellite in flight had failed to separate at the designated time.
The vehicle and OCO were therefore too heavy and travelling too slowly to make orbit."
It was a mechanical failure not a misjudgment.
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It was really just another testament to the lack of redundancy and thin margins in so space launch tech. - With tens or hundreds of thousands of components, vicious weight requirements, a harsh extreme environment, caustic fuel, and near zero fault tolerance the reliability of todays space launchers is actually amazingly good.
We should face it space will never have a near 100% success margin until we have a superior launch technology, and that depends on either better engine technology or something like space elevators. (A bigger weight margin allows for more redundancy in various systems and things like those 'Taurus' door units.)
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We should ask ourselves 'what led Vic B-W to believe there was a miscalculation of power?'.
My bet is that he stopped reading at "Its rocket had malfunctioned."
Just before that, the correspondent had painted a picture of a rocket arching upwards and then diving down to crash at sea.
Many might interpret that as not having enough power to get to orbit, and thus latch onto a cultural desire to poke a bit of fun at the 'elite' (specialists) - to bring them back down to Earth, pardon the pun. Perhaps this is a characteristic of us British?
Communication of engineering to the public (including the media who repackage the message) requires great skill.
~Andrew~
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To Robert Lucien:
even if the racket had enough thrust to get to orbit with the fairing still attached, the satellite would be useless, cause the fairing has to open (and be releasd) for the satellite to be able to separate from the launcher. There is no point having the extra thrust to get to orbit with the fairing attached, since the satellite cannot be released anyway...
Space elevators are far away in the future, and hey... even your toasters and washing machines fail every now and then, why do you expect the rockets to be 100% reliable? Just because there are cameras around when they work?
Have a look at what is happening with Toyota cars..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgQpfZ-1D-g&feature=related
1:25 and on, first fairing then satellite, there is no reason for thrust redundancy if the fairing is still on. Different rocket but you get the picture.
Cheers.
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a carbon copy of the first satellite?
Why not improve? The design will be years behind the build and the build behind the launch, times and ideas do move on....... well I hope they do.
Don't forget to open the fairing this time eh?
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As a schoolkid I DID make a rocket.... pretty similar to the things the PLO launch from Gaza actually. Fuelled with among other things fertliser, weedkiller, aluminium powder, hair bleach and sugar. I have no idea how high it went but I'd estimate well over 500 metres before it blew apart and bits cartwheeled off into space. Apart from being damn lucky not to be caught and jailed...and even luckier still to have a face (these days I'd be held as a terrorist probably!) it rather proves that schoolkids can't get large payloads into geo-stationary orbit. The parachute I'd stuck inside the nose cone DID deploy however, but it deployed in flames so even that didn't work very well.
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#8 Actually in military technology at least some of the most reliable and capable equipment is over 50 years old. The AK47 was first made in 1947 but gets the job done quite nicely and is virtually indestructable. The finest machine gun ever made was the German MG42 (1942) thats still being made by several European arms companies and variants are in use in Afghanistan now (on both sides!) The C130 Hercules transport plane, B52 and Harrier jumpjet are 50+ year old designs upgraded a bit..... the list could go on forever. For really important jobs tried and tested has a lot of advantages over high-tech.
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@Peter_Sym: you're dead right that a child today trying to repeat your experiment would be charged as a terrorist.
Paranoia and pathological risk-aversion mean that at least a generation's initiative and invention will be squandered in this country as they're taught that nothing constructive yet fun can be done without a release form, safety gear, a 3-hour safety lecture, an under-qualified (yet apparently responsible) adult present, a local council health and safety inspection, signed approval from the Home Office, and a visit from the coppers who'll probably veto the whole idea anyway.
I learned a lot doing stupid, dangerous stuff and if the kids today were given the same chances we had, the ones that survive would be smarter, more independent, and far better developed critical faculties. Can't have that now, can we?
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@AndrewRH: The point is very well made. As communicators, we constantly ask ourselves whether the language we use is appropriate. The trick in a specialist subject like this is to speak in an interesting way to those who have "the knowledge" whilst at the same time engaging those who do not. We do not always get the balance right.
@Barry White: The test is whether the re-built spacecraft will still deliver measurements that surpass those of instruments currently in orbit. The assessment is that OCO-2 will be very sensitive, and will deliver data that advances the knowledge acquired by the sensors flown by the likes of the Gosat and Aqua satellites.
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#11 To be fair as a 32 year old I'm fairly horrified at what the 12-15 year old Peter got away with. I'm remarkably lucky that I didn't kill or badly injure myself or others. God knows what I'd have accomplished with internet access back then.... a cloud of Anthrax blowing across Glasgow probably! What I produced back then was more potent than most UK terrorists (fortunately) seem to manage.
I am lucky that I'm just old enough that my science teachers were allowed to carry out experiments in class that had some risk and between that and my parents turning a blind eye to what I was doing for hours in the shed (most of the time..... ) did really encourage me to pursue science as a career. We even made TNT in class, the joke being that the acid and the toluene - very carcinogenic- are far more dangerous than the end product which is virtually impossible to detonate. It burns like napalm though!
P.S I'm quite amused by the 'ones who survive' part of your last sentence, more because its true. Certainly a fair few early scientists didn't. Even I wasn't dumb enough to copy Ben Franklin and fly kites in thunderstorms.
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#7 wrongstuff - That redundancy I mentioned would maybe have included a backup pyrotechnic for the door release. In fact those one shot systems that only fire in mid mission are among the most common sources of failure in all space missions. - Rockets fail to fire, doors fail to open, a timer to wake up doesn't work, solar panels don't unfurl properly, parachutes fail to deploy, etc. Its just as likely that someone on the ground left in a critical pin or failed to remove a safety tape - space launch preparations have to be totally meticulous.
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#8 Barry White - when they say a carbon copy they don't necessarily mean an exact copy in every single way. He describes CryoSat-2 as a carbon copy of CryoSat but that isn't strictly true, parts have gotten smaller and more efficient meaning that there is a greater capacity for obtaining data than there was in the original CryoSat mission.
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