Done! Göran Marklund, left, and Per-Arne Lindqvist celebrate after the successful launch of the MMS mission last night at Cape Canaveral.
Lindqvist, a space and plasma physics research scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and his colleague, Professor Göran Marklund, were on their way to a reception for MMS mission scientists, engineers and managers, and their families, after which all 1,600 people would proceed to outdoor bleachers to witness scientific history being made.Göran Marklund, left, and Per-Arne Lindqvist celebrate after the successful launch of the MMS mission last night at Cape Canaveral.
Seated about 9km from the launch pad, the audience was too far away to experience the kind of explosive roar Lindqvist recalls from witnessing the Cluster mission launch from a distance of 2km at the Bakinour Cosmodrome in 2000. But this being a night launch, yesterday’s audience got a different kind of treat.
“We could see the rocket engine for much longer, actually all through the burn of the first stage and until the second stage took over,” Lindqvist says. “It was a spectacular sight against the night sky. It was quite bright.”
The audience also got to hear the launch communications over the loudspeakers. “It was quite impressive to hear 1,600 people joining in on the countdown: 10, 9, 8, 7 …”, he says.
“All is well, up to and including the separations, so that all 4 spacecraft are now in the correct orbit around Earth,” he says. “Now those of us who are involved in the project will start working with all the planned tasks, like switching on all instruments over the next few months.”
David Callahan
Raw video captures the excitement of last night’s launch of the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission at Cape Canaveral. It was shot with a phone camera by KTH space and plasma physics research scientist Per-Arne Lindqvist, a member of the KTH team that designed the mission’s electric field measuring instruments.
The view from space: an MMS observatory in Earth’s medium orbit, as conceived by a NASA artist. (Image: NASA)
There aren’t many people from Sweden who get to do what Göran Marklund and Per-Arne Lindqvist are doing this week. Actually, I doubt there are any.
The two Swedish space and plasma physics scientists are in Florida, holed up in scientific meetings with their colleagues on a 1-billion dollar NASA mission. By Thursday night in the U.S., they’ll be watching from the bleachers in Cape Canaveral, as an Atlas V 421 rocket lifts off with instruments they’ve worked on for the past 10 years.
“I’ve never been on any launch of a big satellite mission,” says Marklund. “But I have been involved in a number of launches of smaller Swedish and international rockets.”
Their equipment will measure all three components of the electric field in Earth’s magnetosphere, with unprecedented resolution—on the order of milliseconds. But they’ll have to wait weeks until the instruments can actually start collecting data.
“On smaller Swedish spacecraft, it doesn’t take more than a day before we can start switching instruments on and we have to get back to KTH to start taking data,” Lindqvist says.
“But for these much larger ESA and NASA missions,” Marklund interjects, “they have things to do on the spacecraft, to put them into orbit, to get them into the constellation, etc., so it can take a week before they are ready to start switching on instruments.”
Both scientists will return to Sweden after the launch, but Lindqvist will fly to the MMS Science Operation Center at Colorado University in Boulder on April 3, to join in the four-week-long process of commissioning the electric field instruments on the four spacecraft being launched.
“All instruments are switched on, one-by-one and checked,” Lindqvist explains. “A very long part of the commissioning is for our instruments, because we have these long wire booms which have to be deployed carefully, one after the other, in sequence.”
Work will go on around the clock so that the commissioning of the KTH instruments will be interspersed with other equipment. But it has to be done in stages over weeks, and at all hours of the day. “I won’t be concerned with regular office hours,” Lindqvist says.
Marklund and Lindqvist will be responsible for the procedure when the 60 m long wire booms are ejected. “I’ve been responsible all along in planning the details about how far we go out with each boom, and where we want to stop and what the spin rate should be in order for things to be deployed properly,” Lindqvist says.
Awaiting launch, the Atlas V 421 rocket stands at Cape Canaveral. (Photo: NASA)
“We have 16 booms to deploy, two at a time to keep it stable, that is, the opposing booms,” he says. “These are held out by the centrifugal force in the spin plane. We also built the electronics for the axial booms, but the mechanical properties are different for them. You have to be sure the spacecraft is stable, so it doesn’t tip over. This is why the 12-13 m long axial booms need to be deployed after the radial booms have been fully deployed, stabilizing the spacecraft.”
Together, these six booms make up the electric field instruments of the spacecraft. “We have an operation almost every day,” Lindqvist says.
But first there’s the matter of launching the Atlas V 421 rocket that carries the four MMS vehicles. “We’ll arrive at the Kennedy Space Center visitors complex, where we can park and then we’re taken to the Apollo/Saturn V Center, for a reception the evening before the launch.”
The two will be seated on bleachers about 9 km from the launch pad, which sounds far away, but in reality is close enough for the stunning display very few people ever get to see.
There’s even a chance they can visit the launch pad before blast-off. “We heard however that only U.S. citizens can go to the launch pad, but these things change all the time,” Lindqvist says. “We’ll see.”
Stockholm could become a model commuting city with the introduction of shared self driving cars.
Oh, to live in the future, where all the great ideas we have today actually are being used.
Researchers from KTH’s department of Transport and Location Analysis and Center for Traffic Research have taken a look at what would happen if Stockholm had a fleet of 9,700 self-driving cars — cars that could be shared by people who don’t mind carpooling. And what they found was during rush hours, each of these Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAV) has the potential to reduce traffic volume by 14 cars.
It’s about making the “smart car” as popular as the smartphone.
Not only that, but cars involved in the rush hour commute would only need 20 percent of the city’s current parking spaces.
There are of course some contingencies. Have a look at the report. The main things are that people would have to be willing to share a ride with a stranger, they would have to wait six minutes for the car to show up, and their trip would take about 13 percent longer than usual.
But it’s a small price to pay for a completely transformed rush hour. One where there are fewer crashes, and nobody arrives at work frazzled and angry. Riders wouldn’t have to bother with traffic but could get some work done on their laptop or just stare out the window and ruminate. You might even find that the shared car is a good place to do some networking.
It’s a tough call to make: it’s a work night and suddenly you’re feeling a little dizzy. A little tickle creeps into the back of your throat. Come to think of it, you’re feeling a little clammy too. Could be you’re coming down with something; but you’re not really sure about it. And what about that 9 a.m. meeting you’ve organized for tomorrow? Do you start emailing everyone now, or wait until 7 a.m. when you’re trying to get the kids ready for school in between emergency trips to the bathroom?
But what if there were an app that could predict whether you’ll be sick tomorrow, as well as whether your colleagues are getting sick?
Too creepy? Or awesomely practical?
That’s the question raised by an app designed by researchers at KTH’s Mobile Life research center. Right now, Illbook is a design specification, and it’s intended in part to provoke thought about how far we want to go with personal health in the Internet of Things.
The idea is that the app mines your personal data and applies analytics to predict when you will get sick. It draws on info that can be readily be collected from your mobile, including whom you met in recent days, if your child had symptoms of illness, and which of your colleagues have been ill.
The app could also use sensors if you connect them. With enough data, it is possible to predict whether you — or even a colleague — will be sick tomorrow.
If you think this is starting to sound a little invasive, you’re not alone. According to the project site, these Illbook scenarios are intended to expose “policy issues that need to be addressed around data and employment regulations, as it makes visible tensions between efficiency and usefulness on the one hand and privacy and data ownership on the other. Furthermore, the designs reveal tensions around the stories that can be told about our bodies based on our digital traces.”
But, on the plus side, you won’t have to worry about canceling meetings while you’re vomiting. And you can proactively prevent the spread of infection at the office. You’re colleagues might just thank you — if you care to tell them you’ve been using data this way.
The four MMS spacescraft, equipped with instruments designed by KTH scientists, are put on display last week for journalists prior to encapsulation at Astrotech Space Operations facility in Titusville, Florida. (Photo: NASA/Ben Smegelsky)
Each of the four NASA satellites will carry four of the sensors created by KTH, which will extend from the spacecraft on 60 m long retractable wires, housed in the titanium nitride coated spherical casing, which gives them their golden hue. A prototype of the wire boom system, which resembles a fishing reel, was engineered at KTH. (Photo: Håkan Lindgren)
The mission is to study magnetic reconnection around the Earth, a fundamental process that occurs throughout the universe where magnetic fields connect and disconnect explosively releasing energy.
Meanwhile, two of the KTH scientists involved in the mission, Göran Marklund and Per-Arne Lindqvist, are preparing to travel to Cape Canaveral for the launch. They and their team have dedicated the working-hour equivalent of 10 years to constructing instruments and power supplies that will enable four satellites to take ultra-high resolution measurements of the ion and electron distributions and electric and magnetic fields within cosmic plasma flows.
So, what’s it like to for a European scientist to be involved in a major NASA space mission? We’ll keep you up to date with the mission from their perspective over the next few weeks, and even further on when Per-Arne travels to Boulder, Colorado for the commissioning of the equipment (a rather lengthy process spanning weeks).
The project will help scientists understand the process of magnetic reconnection, which can accelerate particles up to nearly the speed of light. By studying reconnection near Earth, MMS will help scientists understand reconnection in the atmosphere of the sun and other stars, in the vicinity of black holes and neutron stars, and at the boundary between our solar system’s heliosphere and interstellar space.
The mission consists of four identical spacecraft that will provide the first three-dimensional view of magnetic reconnection. Launch is scheduled for 10:44 p.m. (that’s 3:44 a.m. for those of us in the CET timezone) March 12, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Here’s who’s participating in the brief:
Jeff Newmark, interim director, Heliophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington
Jim Burch, principal investigator, MMS Instrument Suite, Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
Craig Tooley, MMS Project Manager, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland
Paul Cassak, associate professor, West Virginia University, Morgantown
For more information about the MMS mission, visit:
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