ESA today announced the successful completion of the GeoFlow-II experiment campaign aboard the ISS, for those of you interested in experimental work on the interior dynamics of planets.

GeoFlow is a dimensional-similarity fluid-dynamic experiment in the Fluid Science Laboratory aboard the International Space Station. It uses a spherical fluid chamber with heat, pressure, and central attraction force to study the convection patterns in the interiors of planets, investigating the flows with schlieren interferometry. The first flight campaign launched with the lab in 2008, and modeled convection in the Earth’s liquid outer core. The second re-used the hardware, launching in 2011 after modification and refurbishment on the ground, to study the viscous mantle convection.

During my time at ESTEC, I had a small role in the verification and validation of the GeoFlow experiment hardware, and in the early planning for this second flight.

ESA has a more detailed article here.

In case you’re curious what I’m up to, here are a few recent mentions on websites other than this one. First off, my grad-student research is being highlighted on the CPSX website at the moment. It’ll be on the front page for a while, after which you can still find it here.

I recently worked with the CPSX outreach co-ordinator, Alyssa Gilbert, and teachers from the Thames Valley District School Board to develop and run a series of space robotics workshops for elementary school students, using Lego Mindstorms gear. The board’s online newsletter describes that program here.

And I also took Alyssa flying, which she’s written about on her blog.

Speaking of Lego, Marianne from CPSX has posted a video on the topic.

And, of course, Western Worlds is still going strong, with new interviews each week. You can generally hear me on the discussion panel, and often as the interviewer.

A team from the Royal Military College of Canada launched FLOAT-3 last month, the third Flying Laboratory for Observation of ADS-B Transmissions. This was the first flight of a new, more effective receiver system, using a balloon and payload support system improved from the system flown twice in 2009. I’ve just had word from Ron Vincent, the RMC professor leading the project, and a former advisor on my master’s thesis work, that the launch, operations, and payload retrieval were a complete success, and that the receiver performed excellently.

The FLOAT-3 Balloon system shortly after launch.

The FLOAT program began in 2009. I was one of two graduate students who together with Ron and three undergrads, put together the first-ever stratospheric balloon mission to track aircraft using the ADS-B navigation transponder system. The data gathered formed a core component of my master’s thesis, which showed, partly on the experimental demonstration of FLOAT-1 and -2, that air traffic monitoring over remote and oceanic airspace using orbital ADS-B reception was in principle possible. This year’s mission uses new receiver and payload designs, and the successful techniques and experience gained during those first two flights. The next goals for the program include deployment of a receiver aboard a nanosatellite in low Earth orbit — that spacecraft design is already well advanced.

The FLOAT-3 payload container at its landing point southeast of Wingham, Ontario.

Congratulations to the whole FLOAT-3 team. I look forward to the next steps.

A local news article is available here, and an amateur-radio blogger from Kingston has the ground track of the balloon here.

Photos above provided by Ron Vincent of the Royal Military College of Canada.

This is a fantastic image.

It’s Ed White, Gemini 4 astronaut. He’s got a look of quiet contemplation fitting of pausing from your groundbreaking experimental space mission to look out on your home world, or the depths of outer space. I can read all kinds of emotions into that expression because I can identify so clearly with it. I don’t know what he was feeling at the time, but I know how it makes me feel. White is doing something substantial. Important. Trail-blazing. Difficult. Demanding, challenging, and risky. And it has afforded him a chance to consider his place in that effort, and in his world and the broader universe.
Continue reading →

There’s something charming about finding the stars you learned about as a child revealed, one by one, to host planetary systems. Even the best optical telescope images from my childhood showed a bright spot, shining in the cold, empty darkness of space. But now that I’m grown up, it seems that as I get back in touch with them, I find they’ve got children. Fomalhaut, for example. Or Epsilon Eridani. Even Vega seems to have a debris disk, at least. That universe I learned about, with vast, empty, cold spaces surrounding isolated, lonely stars seems to be revealing itself to be something very different. Where many (most?) stars have some kind of icy or rocky system of satellites, and the planetary systems that form in many of these cases come in surprising and baffling diversity. The universe is getting more crowded, more interesting, and less empty, and the age of exoplanet searches is an exciting time to be working in planetary science and exploration.

Just some thoughts:

I spent last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference just outside of Houston, Texas. With an annual attendance of around 2000, it’s the main conference for people who study the nature and history of the solar system. All day long, in four or five parallel sessions, the world’s community of planetary scientists, robotics engineers, and the like present their latest discoveries and hypotheses about all the strange worlds that we find near the Earth.

It served to remind me once again what a fantastic job I have. My main task, for the last week, was to listen to presentations about all the strange and surprising wonders that fill the solar system. To learn, discuss, meet with people who work on these things, and broaden and deepen my knowledge of the physical processes at work so I can better contribute to the development of technologies and missions to further explore and understand these strange worlds. Because that’s my job, after all: learn to do the things that enable space exploration. And boy, are those worlds strange enough to make exploring them irresistible. Continue reading →

Searching for a partner-in-life is a lot like SETI, except there are a whole lot of Wow! signals.

In the first place, it’s a big universe, and there are a lot of stars out there. And it’s likely that somewhere in all that vastness, among or below those countless stars, there’s someone else who looks up at them rather like you do. So there’s hope. SETI is not a dead-end road.

But at the same time, it’s important to remember that the distances are large, and that you can expect it to take a long time to find anything. In fact, it’s difficult even to guess at how long it might be, because the factors that influence it are so variable. It could be quite a while, though, and so since we didn’t stumble across the United Federation of Planets in the first little while after we switched on the radio telescopes, there’s an important operating principle we must adopt: to accept that the search may take an indefinitely long time. We could bump into a Golden Record from Alpha Centauri next week, or we could still be looking a thousand years from now, even if we develop spectacular new technologies. It’s no reason to give up hope — as we said at the outset, it’s a big universe — but the realities of cosmic geography make the expected mean time to contact long. So we can’t depend on it.

For the forseeable future, we must accept that it’s just us here, no matter who may be just around the corner in the stellar neighborhood. We can’t hope that contact with aliens will happen soon, and give us the dose of perspective we need to get over our resource wars, our loyalty to man-made economic systems, our religious differences, or anything else we struggle with. This is our house, and it’s entirely up to us. We all live here, and nobody else is going to come save us, so we’d better get our lives in order and learn to get along. We can’t sit around waiting for the Vulcans to descend from the sky and say “You complete me.” We need to be able to live on our own in steady-state.

Which isn’t to say that we give up looking for companions in the cosmos. Continue reading →

I spent much of my master’s degree at the Royal Military College of Canada working on ADS-B, a new system of air traffic surveillance. In particular, I was looking at how to detect aircraft transponder signals from orbit, what kind of satellite system would be needed to do that, and how to integrate that information into the air traffic management system. I’ve published on it before, but now my professor at RMC, Ron Vincent, has an article in Physics in Canada, which describes that work, particularly as an example of an effective student project that had real science and technology results. You can read it here.

The first episode of Western Worlds is available in mp3 format for download from CPSX. It features my interview with Dr. Gordon Osinski about impact craters, and a follow-up discussion on the topic with the Western Worlds panel of the week.

Tune in Mondays at 10 PM EST to hear the program each week, or watch CPSX.ca for recorded episodes. Western Worlds is also available on Twitter (and so am I, as @CosmicRaymond)