Good luck Parker Solar Probe

Source: NASA launches Parker Solar Probe mission to study the sun up close - SpaceNews.com

A NASA mission to travel closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft is on its way after a successful launch from Cape Canaveral Aug. 12.

The United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy carrying NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 3:31 a.m. Eastern. Controllers scrubbed a launch attempt the previous day because of technical issues late in the countdown. The spacecraft separated from its kick stage 43 minutes after launch.

The 700-kilogram spacecraft required not only a Delta 4 Heavy but also a Star 48BV kick stage from Northrop Grumman in order to counteract the Earth’s rotational speed around the sun, allowing it to fall closer to the sun. The spacecraft will also perform a series of Venus flybys, starting in early October, to bring it closer to the sun.
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There are reports that the Sun is cooling and some claim there is a solar pattern that predicts the solar radiance. This will be a close look and assuming it survives, we're about to learn a lot. But the Delta heavy launch sure seemed ponderous compared to the Falcon heavy.

In contrast to the video from Falcon launches all the way to deployment, Delta reverts to graphics that look like cheaply made animation. Perhaps unfair because Delta dates from 58 years ago compared to the more modern Falcon family. Still, the Falcon heavy launch was more impressive.

Bob Wilson

 

Begging for an apology for my career:

NASA's budget payed for people like me:

• hardware multiply - an upgrade to a PDP-11 included a floating point co-processor but the compiler did not generate the code. So I wrote assembly language routines that increased their image processing software by a factor of 10. This is early software that processed Landsat data.
• PDP-8 printer to serial interface - the documentation was using a PDP-8 word processor but we needed the documents in a DEC-10 when there was no common media. I bought the parts and configured a parallel-to-serial interface that looked like a printer to the PDP-8 and a terminal line to the DEC-10 so we could "print into the DEC-10."
• IBM mainframe data interface - data would come in via a parallel interface but periodically it would hang and operations would take 30 minutes to reboot. Reading the schematics, I found the error status was transferred over the same parallel interface that had a problem so both sides had to be reset by rebooting both the hardware and IBM mainframe. So I wrote a channel program reset routine and tested it the next time . . . it worked. The interface could still hang but the 30 minutes reboot was gone.
• switched from IBM operating system programmer to VAX/VMS - wrote a script to extract design and user documentation from the comments of the code. The application programmers gave feedback that was incorporated in the code and a stub device driver written so they could integrate their code with the driver while we waited for the hardware to arrive 30 days later. Four hardware interfaces were handled by three device drivers. I helped the integration and test team resolve some ugly overlay problem in the application software. Developed a general purpose, performance monitor that identified processing bottlenecks in the application code that was commercially sold. Read the VAX hardware schematics and developed a way to use a multi-channel, digital analyzer connected to the backplane to diagnose errors in device code and memory clean-up in VMS. The memory clean-up was a subsequent fix DEC put in all VMS systems. Signed off with "This is the best device driver document I have ever seen" when it came around with someone else's name as the author. Tuned a seven step, mainframe routine by rewriting processes (aka., steps) to be subroutines processed under two programs (i.e. steps,) It reduced the processing cost by a factor of five. Developed a VMS, virtual printer interface for a 128k Mac and later run length encoding to compress and decompress the images. It led to moving to Huntsville AL when our successful bid won a major contract. Instead of vector graphics, we used bit-maps that were 10x faster but this was a Navy program.
• joined Boeing at Marshall Space Flight Center - Eight years earlier, an obscure software problem in one of my first device drivers that the Goddard configuration control board denied fixing. I took a personal day to re-diagnose the problem which worked. Configured a script to e-mail key crash information for the VAX/VMS systems so I could work problems within minutes and call the local admin with a diagnosis and sometimes a fix. Ran out of VAX/VMS problems except for intermittent network problems. Because existing ethernet sniffers were too expensive to loan to me and VAX/VMS drivers too slow, I wrote a parasitic device driver that buffered ethernet frames into larger buffers that was ~5-10 times faster. Diagnosed network "broadcast storms" that were knocking users offline (i.e., blue screen of death.) Joined the network operations team and began diagnosis of intermittent network problems. Maintained DEC Polycenter, SNMP enterprise monitor, that was underutilized.
• NASA HQ network engineer - modeled replacement of End-Of-Life hubs with a switched Cisco network saving ~$1M of avoidable costs. Later moved to operations and oversaw network wiring upgrade to Cat-5 that replaced Cat-nothing, crap wiring to the desk tops. Managed HP Openview and Cisco enterprise monitors. A supervisor, I handled personnel problems.
• Network security team leader - diagnosed and fixed an obscure Linux driver problem and a compromised system. Managed to separate the development team from the operations team. Diagnosed a network routing problem that was blocking a routed link.
• NASA WAN network engineer - specialized in tail sites where contractors and university researches needed a link to NASA's private networks to get data for various missions. Always under the most restrictive budgets, designed and oversaw everything from circuits to hardware integration to maximize the most cost-effect solution. For example, the first Mars explorer mission was supposed to last 90 days and needed high reliability because command and control was in San Diego connected to JPL in Los Angles yet they needed significant data capacity as well as 4-wire telephone support (house land lines are 2-wire.) It was replaced four years later by significantly more expensive circuits and hardware as mine had reached End-Of-Life without a change.
• enterprise monitor admin - I kept it running until End-Of-Life when I retired and the new kids had deployed the replacement.

NASA budgets pay the salaries of many curious, clever people . . . not all like me. But people who race against ignorance, sloth, and cruelty. No, we sometime reach too far and there are the occasional 'brats.' But we are a stronger, smarter country because we keep these bright, often underpaid people.

Yes, I am aware and admire Burt Rutan and Elon Musk who have individually achieve excellence. But inspite of some snarky comments, both have tasted tax payer dollars which kept them in business.

Bob Wilson

 

Of course if the solar probe survives the mission, it also means we have electronics relatively immune to a nuclear, anti-missile weapon.

Bob Wilson

 

"Plan 9 From Outer Space" ??


Bob Wilson