From Jars to the Stars News

January 10, 2011

There's stuff going on -- I've just been remiss in posting to this page. For updates, check the Facebook ticker at right, the Earthview Media News & Events page, and my Earthview Blog.

November 30, 2010

In the November 26-December 2 edition of the Denver Business Journal, Bruce Goldberg's "Street Talk" column leads with a great rundown of "From Jars to the Stars." His column on page A4 is titled, "Ball Aerospace stars in Neff space-history book."

Bruce, a former colleague at shuttered DBJ sister-publication Front Range TechBiz, is an editor, columnist, humorist, and president of the Denver Press Club, for which he's been a dedicated volunteeer for many years now.

November 18, 2010

Working on a presentation for my first public reading of "From Jars to the Stars." As it would happen, it's at Ball Aerospace itself, the company whose exploits over the past 60-odd years the book is about. Nobody knows more about Ball Aerospace than this crew. Although I suppose not many of them have been through the Minnetrista Heritage Collection archives to dig around for half-century-old letters pertaining to the formation of the company. Or the National Air & Space Museum archives, or the NASA History archives etc etc. But despite my best efforts to learn their business, they know a lot more about spacecraft development than I do, and they always will.

We've set up a "From Jars to the Stars" community page on facebook, linked by a fancy Facebook box on this page. Become a fan! I'll probably use that as the go-to place for announcements. I posted 100+ photos there, many of which are in the book, many of which are not. Nice thing is, like the e-book versions (iBook, Nook and Kobo still pending; Amazon Kindle available here), the color photos are. . . in color!

Note that if you downloaded the Kindle version of "Jars" prior to about November 12, a coding quirk erased the front cover image -- this has been rectified. That version also had a strange, digital-only text gaffe that changed the sentence "Good scientists have much in common with successful entrepreneurs" to "Food scientists have much in common with successful entrepreneurs." This may be true of food scientists, too, of course, but I have never met a food scientist and am in a poor position to make broad declarations about them. So please delete the version on your Kindle and re-download it in the next couple of days for a fresher (and, we hope, final) version.

Two weeks after the Deep Impact spacecraft's encounter with its second comet, the images of Hartley 2 continue to amaze. This particular link is really interesting because Mike A'Hearn's team has created a sort of two-slide show demonstrating what the Hubble Space Telescope-derived deconvolution algorithms for Deep Impact's High Resolution Instrument (big telescope) are capable of. It's astounding, if you think about it, that applied math can turn the foggy version of this image into the crisp one alternating with it.

Space scientists are always saying that a given bunch of data will keep them busy for years, but thinking about the 120,000 shots-plus-spectra pouring back from the Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft, it's hard to be skeptical of them at this point. One interesting thing I learned from a recent visit with Alan Delamere, the man who brought Deep Impact to Ball and now an EPOXI science-team member, is that the High Resolution Imager missed the comet during the very closest approach. But it still captured some amazing shots.

Alan is a delightful guy. I brought my daughter, Lily, 7, up to his Mapleton Hill home in Boulder a couple weeks back, to talk about the book and see some EPOXI images. He has a sort of scientist's lair in a converted attic--multiple flat-screen monitors, the major IT work courtesy of his son Philip, who does this sort of thing for a living. I spent several hours up there in 2006-8, going over old Deep Impact proposals, learning about the origins of the Discovery Program, generally being brought up to speed on how the space business works. Now here I was with Lily and Alan's granddaughter Hannah. Both wore red-blue 3-D glasses as they checked out 3-D Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images on Alan's screens (Alan is also on the HiRISE science team -- HiRISE being the imager that overtook Deep Impact's big telescope as the largest ever to leave Earth orbit).

Along the way, we had lunch with former Deep Impact program manager Monte Henderson, without whose championing of my journalistic efforts I would have never been able to report the book. Lily's a few years from being able to digest this thing, but I wanted to be able to reminder her one day that she'd met two of these very key players.

The Deep Impact spacecraft has, for trivia buffs out there, brought home images from 40 percent of the comets ever seen up close (okay, two of the five). It would be interesting to know what percentage of cometary data in general this spacecraft has brought home. Stardust, with its sample-return in 2006, might still have it beat -- there's a lot of information packed into those hunks of comet dust.

November 4, 2010, part II

A few words about the stunning success of the Deep Impact spaceraft's flyby of comet Hartley 2 today. First, if you haven't seen the imagery, check out the EPOXI mission website (Deep Impact's rebranded name). Phenomenal shots. And if keep in mind that every image delivered today was taken from the smaller Medium Resolution Instrument -- not the big telescope, the biggest ever to venture beyond Earth orbit when launched in 2005. Its images come back blurry and need to be deconvolved, a story in itself that I talk about in the book. Those are going to be amazing.

I think it's easy to forget how hard it was to deliver these images. Never mind the incredible efforts, described in From Jars to the Stars, to get Deep Impact built, launched and behaving in space. Watching NASA TV (the JPL crew did a great job with coverage, btw), it's easy to be lulled into the belief that swinging by a new comet is akin to taking a quick detour to the dry cleaner's on the way home from work.

But think about it. Deep Impact is in orbit A, comet Hartley 2 is in orbit B. NASA agrees to a $33 million follow-on mission (it ended up $42 million, because everything in space costs more than we think it will) combining Drake Deming's planet hunt (EPOCh) and Mike A'Hearn's comet flyby (DIXI). EPOXI is born. But to get to another comet, you've got to meet it at point C. The comet's going to be invisible for much of its trip, too far from the sun to ignite the amazing jets we saw today, darker than charcoal. When it shows up as a blur on the biggest telescopes on Earth, it turns out Hartley 2 is small and volatile, jetting all over the place, each jet an orbit change, each orbit change an alteration of the time it will be at point C -- which, by the way, is changing, too. You've got a good deal of fuel, but not an infinite amount of it. So you've got to figure out when to fire your thrusters, how to use Earth as a slingshot to change the spacecraft's orbit, all sorts of things. It takes gobs of navigation talent, which the Jet Propulsion Laboratory fortunately has in rare abundance.

At encounter, Hartley 2 was in a different place in the solar system -- most importantly, at a different relative position with respect to the sun and Earth. That affects communications, as was mentioned in the NASA TV coverage. Deep Impact's big antenna was oriented so the spacecraft could talk to JPL's Deep Space Network and image comet Tempel 1 simultaneously thorughout the approach. With Hartley 2, they had to physically reorient the spacecraft to send data home, then reorient back on target. So you have to figure out when to shoot and when to drain the memory cards, so to speak. Thermal control was also an issue -- the sun gets things really hot out there, and it's frigid in the shade. Completely different calculus. Add to this the fact that, as with Deep Impact, the decisive moments happened under the control of AutoNav, the autonomus navigation software enhanced for Deep Impact. No humans involved.

There's much more. The point is, a group of engineers at Ball and JPL and scientists led by Mike A'Hearn have been working on all these details for years. Their spacecraft traveled 3 billion miles to capture incredible data about a 1-mile-long object from 435 miles away -- farther than New York City is from Raleigh, North Carolina -- at a relative speed of more than 27,000 mph. In all, it was another amazing achievement in space.

Notable EPOXI press: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, Der Spiegel.

October 23, 2010
The first editorial review of "From Jars to the Stars" is in! It's from Leonard David, an esteemed space writer now with the Coalition for Space Exploration.

"The award-winning author has done a masterful job in telling the story that there’s more to space exploration than space and exploration – it’s the people!" David writes. "Neff has captured the dedication and creativity of engineers, designers and others – the collective enterprise of imagineers who make space exploration happen." Read the whole review here.