Fwd: Would-Be Rescuers of Wayward Spacecraft Previously Solved a NASA Mystery

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: July 16, 2014 12:14:58 PM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Would-Be Rescuers of Wayward Spacecraft Previously Solved a NASA Mystery

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/science/space/would-be-rescuers-of-zombie-spacecraft-had-previously-solved-a-nasa-mystery.html

 

Would-Be Rescuers of Wayward Spacecraft Previously Solved a NASA Mystery

By KENNETH CHANG

JULY 15, 2014

Photo

A portion of a high-resolution image of earth as seen from above the surface of the moon. The image was taken by the Lunar Orbiter 1 in August 1966 and restored by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames Research Center. Credit NASA/LOIRP

Before reviving a zombie spacecraft, Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing traveled to the past to rescue a trove of early moon photographs that otherwise would have been destined for oblivion.

They did not actually time travel, but that might have been easier.

In the past couple of months, Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing have popped into the news for re-establishing contact with a 36-year-old spacecraft, NASA's International Sun-Earth Explorer-3, or ISEE-3, which is quickly approaching Earth after a long trip circling the inner solar system. NASA retired ISEE-3 in 1997 and then dismantled the transmitter for talking to it, but most of the systems on the craft remain operational. A shoestring effort led by Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing got back in touch with ISEE-3 in May, although last week they ran into possibly insurmountable problems trying to fire the thrusters and change its course.

Mr. Wingo, an entrepreneur and an engineer, and Mr. Cowing, the editor in chief of the NASA Watch website, had confidence that they could decipher decades-obsolete NASA equipment, because, as Mr. Cowing said, "we've done this before."

Photo

An image of the lunar surface inside crater Copernicus taken in 1967 and recovered from magnetic tapes that had been sitting for decades in the garage of a former NASA employee. Credit LOIRP

The earlier project involved 1,500 magnetic tapes and a couple of old, broken tape drives. In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five robotic spacecraft, the Lunar Orbiters, to photograph the moon's surface to help find safe landing sites for the Apollo astronauts. The tapes, which recorded the original high-resolution images, and the tape drives ended up in the garage of a former NASA employee, and Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing embarked on a quixotic mission to retrieve the images.

"It's the antithesis of your typical NASA project," Mr. Cowing said.

On Monday, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh posted a 22-minute documentary about that project, part of a series of short films looking at how modern digital technologies are transforming photography. An earlier episode showed how a forensic analysis of computer disks discovered previously unknown works by Andy Warhol. This week, the Carnegie team is in Switzerland, working on its next installment, about the CERN particle physics laboratory and how it employs techniques of photography to record the ephemeral tracks of subatomic particles.

 

http://f.vimeocdn.com/p/flash/moogaloop/6.0.14/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=100736619#!flashvars#clip_id=100736619&api=1&moogaloop_type=moogaloop&noscript

The Invisible Photograph: Part III (Extraterrestrial) from Carnegie Museum of Art on Vimeo.

"We're fascinated by that," said Divya Rao Heffley, the program manager for the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum. "The subject matter is hidden and made visible by photography."

For the Lunar Orbiter project, Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing in 2007 rented a couple of trucks and drove the tapes and tape drives to NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., setting up shop in a former McDonald's, which they nicknamed McMoon's.

"I can't think of a better use for an old McDonald's," S. Pete Worden, the director of NASA Ames, says in the documentary.

From there, they conducted a long-odds hunt for old manuals and data and fortuitous connections that put Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing in touch with people who knew how the tape drives worked.

"It's like having one wing of the Library of Alexandria suddenly dropped in your lap," Mr. Cowing says in the film. "And you just have to figure out the card catalog. That was the hard part."

The old electronics were hosed down and refurbished. In the film, Mr. Wingo demonstrates how he has to stop the spinning tape with his finger, because the tape drive's braking mechanism no longer functions.

And yet everything worked.

They got the images over several years starting in 2008 — much sharper than earlier versions that had been photographed off television screens as the data was beamed back to Earth.

With ISEE-3, engineers have similarly wrestled with missing manuals and balky mechanics. Mission control is in McMoon's, next to the deep fryers. The hope is to fire the thrusters to nudge the spacecraft on a trajectory where it will fly close to the moon and be captured into orbit around Earth. But last week, when they attempted the course correction maneuver, the thrusters sputtered. A troubleshooting session the next day suggested that nitrogen gas, used to push fuel to the thrusters, had leaked away over the years.

The team put out a call for help on the Internet, and experts chimed in with information and suggestions. "Because why not?" Mr. Cowing said. "We needed help. We asked. We got great help."

Based on the discussions, the team came up with a repair plan, and on Wednesday, it will send commands that could clear possibly clogged fuel lines.

"We're all space plumbers now," Mr. Cowing said.

Even if the propulsion system cannot be fixed and ISEE-3 zooms past Earth, the plan is to stay in contact and have the spacecraft send back scientific readings as it continues to orbit around the sun.

And then there's Mr. Cowing and Mr. Wingo's next project: an intercontinental ballistic missile lying on its side in the parking lot next to McMoon's. The Titan 1 missile, a relic from the 1960s, had been on display at Ames for years and is still intact, except for the warhead. "They wouldn't give me that," Mr. Cowing said. "I asked."

He would like to refurbish it and transform it into a display that shows how rockets work, including having some of the moving parts move again.

"We just like getting old stuff and giving it a new purpose," he said.

 

© 2014 The New York Times Company 

 

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