Soon in March will come news from MRO, and then on April comes news from Venus Express which will last all round year along with MER (no one knows how far... and Cassini.)

Rodolfo

I bet that bird in the 6th pic down beat it out of there in a hurry

Wow, I'm checking out that last pic on the second page of the empty launch pad, and it seems like the USAF insignia and the flag got pretty roasted by the Atlas' thrust...

Postage will be obsolete by then.

Meanwhile, I, too, am a member of the Planetary Society and have been for many years. I also want Emily's job.

You can't have it

It's been delightful to see how many observers of this thread are members -- but that's not really a surprise. New Horizons, more than most, is "the people's mission." That the launch was so incredibly flawlessly successful is credit to Alan's leadership and APL's engineering and LockMart and Boeing and all the other people they were effusively thanking yesterday. But that it got to the launch pad at all owes no small part to lots of voices, TPS members and Congresspeople and many many others, who wouldn't let the Pluto mission be canceled. The New Horizons team deserves congratulations and thanks -- but so do all of you! We're all going to Pluto, yaayyyy!

--Emily

New Horizons is already about 1 million miles away from Earth...according to Mr. Stern

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspec...ve_current.html

But what do you propose to replace it? Can't stuff a package through the Internet - not yet, anyway.

Of course the Singularity might make it all obsolete by 2015. Wonder if it will make NH part of its matrix, gaining understanding and control of the whole Sol system?

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?...es/art0629.html

Wahoo! "Initial trajectory solutions indicate our launch was almost perfect, needing just perhaps 20 meters/sec or so of makeup delta-V. This is far less than the 100 meter/sec we had budgeted for, meaning we have much more fuel for Pluto and Kuiper Belt encounters than our "3 sigma" planning had to allow for. "

OK, the file is available via HTTP from http://sun.ujep.cz/~lupomesk/nh-launch-xvid.avi. Should be capable of at least 1 MB/sec.

Borek

I'm glad I asked now, nice to see the overlap with people here.

It will be exciting to finally see Pluto and its moons up close; wish it didn't take so long to get there but at least we are on our way now!

You specifically mentioned first-class mail. Unless we get teleporters, there will probably still be packages. But you'll probably pay for the postage over the Internet.

I notice that the Global Network (such a grand name!) still would like to leave us aware that NH's launch was delayed (doubltess somehow because of the dread Plutonium) and that there is still, apparently, time to cancel it.

Well, I could say that its just that the urgency is gone from their cause. But I do wonder if there isn't a tiny bit of disappointment mingled with relief in the minds of some GN members, now that everything has gone off so smoothly.

Because they're facing an ever larger cry-wolf problem...

--Nick

I'm a member and have been for about 15 years - time flies.

Get in line, buddy!



-the other Doug

Alright, it's all on my website now:

http://www.launchphotography.com/NewHorizons.html

Some new ones in the "on the pad, sunset" section.

Enjoy! This makes the launch officially complete for me :-D

Those ultra-wide angle, backlit photos are spectacular!

Airbag

In a thread on sci.space.policy, Jim Oberg commented that his heart flip-flopped when the Atlas V had a 10-20 degree "excursion" about 2 minutes into flight that quickly corrected itself. Another poster said this was due to transition of the launch vehicle from open-loop to close-loop guidance after SRB separation. The thread continued on the excursion appearing to be large, with a later comment that the correction may have been greater than expected.

I don't have the bandwidth to download longer videos of the launch. Did someone here notice that excursion?

Any comment from the NH team on Oberg's observation? (I suspect this is one of those defer to the launch service provider / official channels type of questions.)

It's not uncommon for LV's to turn, quite a lot, after SRB sep. If you look at the rocket-cam views from Spirit and Opportunity - you can see, once SRB sep has occured, the vehicle turns quite a lot. I'm not sure why, but perhaps it's because they have to be in a particular direction for SRB-jet for range reasons, and THEN can pitch to the launch heading they want?

Doug

My brother and I both noticed that rapid turn in the booster orientation after solid sep and both had that "uhoh... what was that" feeling.

To a not-that-crude approximation, the ascent trajectory to orbit is approximately a quasi half-parabola that starts out going straight up and ends up being tangent to it's orbit at orbit insertion shutdown. Departures from that approximation are probably both for optimizing efficiency reasons during different stages of flight, and for purely technical reasons like changes in guidence method.

One of the wildest launches ever was the second Saturn V test flight, where 2 adjacent outboard engines on the second stage shut down. As I recall the story, range safety was ready to blow it, as that was nominally beyond controllability, but the vehicle didn't tumble and guidance said "no.. wait.. it's still flying". It burned long and was well off nominal trajectory when the 3'rd stage separated, enabled a different guidence algorithm, and DOVE TOWARD A POINT BELOW THE HORIZON, trying to gain speed instead of altitude. They were far out over the Atlantic, so guidance still didn't recommend the "big red button". Not that they had more than the faintest idea what the vehicle was trying to do at that point..... I think it actually ended up getting into orbit firing RETROGRADE to get the orbit circularized. (I'd have to check I don't remember which book to confirm that.)

It put the SIVB and CSM into a good orbit, but then due to the same hardware failure that shut down the first of the second stage engines (the second was mis-cross-wired with the first!), it was unable to restart the SIVB engine to kick the CSM into a high elliptical orbit for a high speed reentry test. Only formal launch failure of the entire Saturn program.

The command module did a few orbits and a nominal re-entry and landing near the original recovery target. Got a nice strip of remote sensing images out the window with a camera on a timer, but not a repeat of the gorgeous crescent earth shots Apollo IV got.

Yes, you have the description of Apollo 6 pretty exactly. I know I read the same accounts you have, and while I'm not sure which book it's in, I recall the third stage being described rather anthropomorphically -- saying to itself "I have to pick up speed, the best way to do that is to fire down into the gravity well," then saying "oops, I need altitude, I better swivel around and fire sraight up," and finally saying "Now I'm going too fast -- I better slow down!" and turning all the way around to thrust retrograde just prior to shutdown.

And yet, NASA declared the mission a "qualified success" since the booster did not have to be destroyed, the payload made it into orbit, and the faults that appeared were easily diagnosed and fixed. Had that *not* been the case -- had the booster tumbled, for example -- it's likely that Apollo 8 would have been a third unmanned test of the Saturn V, and Apollo 12 (crewed by Armstrong, Aldrin and either Collins or Lovell) would have achieved the first lunar landing sometime between September and November, 1969...

-the other Doug

Things are going well here at the APL MOC. New Horizons is operating
virtually flawlessly. TCM 1a and 1b are planned for 28 Jan and 30 Jan,
respectively, with a total delta-V of 18 m/s-- which is far smaller than
the 92 m/s budgeted for pre-flight. Good news!

Today we are planning to complete the spacecraft's planned spin down to 5
RPM (was 68 RPM for the STAR-48 firing, is now 19.2 RPM after an open-loop
burn on launch day). Once we slow it down this afternoon, we'll do the
initial star tracker turn ons. Until then, we're still relying on the sun
sensors and IMUs-- both of which are performing very well. The s/c temps
are running a little hot, but that's just due to our attitude combined
with our <1 AU helio distance (we're inside 1 AU because we launched near
Earth's perihelion).

About the heliocentric distance, we will be inside 1 AU until late on 29
Jan UT. That makes us officially an inner planet mission for the first 10
days, I guess.

We will pass the orbit of Mars on 8 April, just a little after MRO
gets there, and it had a 5.5 month head start.

FYI-- The C/A to Jupiter is going to be at approx 6 hrs UTC on 28 Feb
2007. A better number will be forthcoming, but that is good to an accuracy
of better than an hour already. C/A will be at 32 RJ.

Because we have to slow down in TCM-1a and TCM-1B by those 18 m/s,
our intrepid Boeing STAR-48 third stage will beat New Horizons to
Jupiter by 6 hrs. However, because it will not hit the Pluto aim point, it will not
beat us to Pluto (a relief-- can you imagine us having to be the second to
Pluto after all this, having been beat by a derelict Boeing upper stage?).
In fact, the projected C/A distance of the third stage to Pluto will be
213 million km (well over 1 AU), occurring on 15 Oct 2015.

-Alan

Haha... Perhaps the STAR-48 should've been equipped with some science instruments as well if that were the case!



Thanks for the update, Alan

Hey - any chance the STAR-48 might make a close pass to a KBO? Perhaps if it gets close enough, we could at least discern the KBO's mass.

Did anyone either on the NH team or off consider these things before the launch? I would hate to reinvent the wheel.

The STAR-48 is bettery powered. It died <4 hours after launch. As to adding even a passive experiment, even if it could be made to work on a tumbling derelict, it
would have taken from the launch mass of NH, pound for pound. So you either
loose fuel or instruments from NH for this. I chose not to do either, long ago.

-Alan

Alan:

When (not IF!) NH2 gets funded, please consider spending some of that scarce mass on LRRRs on the solid stage. We won't tell anybody, honest!

Bob Shaw

On an initial mission like this, it does not pay to add the "kitchen sink". All the bells-and-whistles can be added for subsequent missions. As an example, with MER, we see that we shoulda/coulda/oughta have done this, that and whatnot to the Rovers, but at the time, JPL did as much as they could with what they had to work with.

--Bill

It's too bad we didn't have astronauts on board that Apollo. We would've had the most colorful and memorable commentary of practically the whole program. Exceeding the comments made by Stafford and Cernan on Apollo 10, I'm sure.

Well, enough of that. Back to more current affairs.

DVandorn: "....And yet, NASA declared the mission a "qualified success" since the booster..."

The distinction I make was that the mission was a failure: If this had been a lunar mission, they'd have done engineering tests in earth orbit for a few days like Apollo 9 and come home.

BUT...very big but... the test of the launch vehicle was a success. Essentially everything was tested, and the problems that cropped up were detected, diagnosed and solved. The one important test was the high speed heat-shield test on the CM. I don't remember the aerodynamics they were testing, but I think a steep entry gives high g's and a strong but not as hot heat pulse, while a shallow entry gives low g's and a long, hot heat pulse. Apollo 4 did one extreme and Apollo 6 was to do the other extreme, and that objective was lost. Obviously, they decided they'd "live with it'.... not the sort of decision made post Columbia.

I have a story I've read but never cross checked against missile histories. An early Atlas missile "blowed up real good" early in it's flight, and they had enough telemetry to tell that there were hot gasses circulating arouind the engines that burned out wiring. They instrumented the hell out of the next vehicle with thermo-sensort in that area, launched it, and it "blowed up real good", too... telling them exactly where the hot gasses were going.

The missile went kablooie, all over the sky. The test was a success. TRY TELLING *THAT* to a reporter or hostile politician.

I think the rationale behind this is that early on, what you want to do is to get out of the dense atmosphere (high drag) as quickly as possible and straight up vertically (whilst augmented with the SRB's) is the quickest way.
Then when drag becomes less of an issue you want to build speed to reach orbital velocity and horizontal (tangential) is the way to go. Obviously they can't launch straight up because of safety reasons.
So you usually see a gradual transition from vertical to horizontal, but NH nodded! it was VERY noticeable and may heart sank for a moment.

But I think the Shuttle does it the best. I watched the first launch on TV and thought it was literally going belly up, which actually it was!

It was nice to see the telemetry from the Centaur upper stage. Another heart stopping moment when I looked back and it was firing and pointing directly at the Indian Ocean - some sort of sling shot manoeuvre I presume.

Nick

Yes - the "OMFG it's coming back down" moment of upper stages. Ariane's do this quite a lot - they get to about 150km or so, then start pitching down and you think "it's coming down -it's all gone wrong" - but they're gaining a lot of speed to get it up to a GTO

Some of the down-looking Delta 2 rocket cams show the upper stage 'taking a left' sometimes - very strange. If you run them at 4x speed, or faster, it's very noticeable.

Doug

Mars Odyssey launch is an excellent example. That thing really turned sideways after SRB sep, it was very noticeable and quite uncomfortable to watch, you could even see how the engine exhaust plume was being noticeably distorted by the engine not firing colinear with the rocket motion, the rarified air assymetrically dragging on the exhaust. Makes me wonder just how much efficiency in a launch is lost this way.

While I'm at it, is there a more complete video of NH launch anywhere? I managed to miss the entire thing due to NASA TV webcast being choked to death (again). The archived real video feed doesn't even go through SRB separation and the other clip mentioned before, which seems to be a CNN vidcap suffers from major brightness washout...
A launch replay similar to MRO would have been great to see, they even have all the tracking shots archived.

Especially as the capsule managed to turn upside down in the water before the self righting system kicked in.

Looking over the information at the Unmanned Spaceflight PDF Apollo 6 seems to have not only had a very rough ride, but been incredibly lucky, because parts were seen flying off the rocket after take off.

Are we talking about the turn NH did at the end of this groundtrack map? That map confused the dickens out of me. I figured that the reverse-track was an illusion, but it's still confusing.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av010/...roundtrack.html

I can see pitching down after getting above the atmosphere, that adds vectors to trade the "upward, out of the air" velocity for "horizontal, orbital, velocity".

--Bill

That retrograde groundtrack is logical once you think about how it happens. After the Centaur 2nd burn and especially after the solid kick motor burn the spacecraft is on a hyperbolic escape trajectory. To a crude approximation you could imagine it as a tangent leaving a point some few hundred km above Earth's surface. The spacecaraft is no longer constantly following Earth's curvature and beating Earth's rotation beneath. Instead, as the spacecraft moves away from the Earth, the tangential part of its velocity (relative to Earth's surface) starts to rapidly drop-off (becoming radial) and eventually Earth's rotation catches up and overtakes the sub-spacecraft point. From there on, the groundtrack becomes retrograde.

A similar retrograde trajectory "loop" is likely also present in satellites in geostationary transfer orbit, only they eventually come to a still in the groundtrack point of view when they reach GEO orbit and circularize it.

This also involves the dynamic pressure issue -- the aero forces acting on the rocket. If you try to build up actual tangential velocity too soon (as opposed to getting up, up, up out of the atmosphere), you risk getting into aero loads that can tear a flimsy old rocket apart. So by going UP early, you get out of the atmosphere more quickly and also actually keep the overall speed down because gravity is fighting you more directly. Then you turn the corner and, now that the air is thin, start cracking on.

I read that when Boeing launched the first Delta 4H, they stayed vertical for an unusually long time for just this reason -- getting some altitude before starting to build too much velocity. As a result, all that LH2 was just hanging out over the cape for a lot longer than was typical. So a lot of non-essential personnel were evacuated.

This dynamic pressure thing is quite significant -- look at the throttle curve for NH's RD180, down to 64% just seconds after launch according to Aviation Week, all just to keep the speed in check until the atmosphere starts to go away.

--Nick (other)

Very good explanation. I had the same inquietud as Bill. Thanks to UGordan

Rodolfo

For those who missed the launch, it can be viewed on the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news_web/...959_16x9_nb.asx

A Wish for New Horizons by Paul Glister

Yesterday’s brief and unplanned exercise in ‘liveblogging’ was caused by an odd discovery: the only way for this observer to track the New Horizons launch was through the Internet. With over 200 channels available through cable television, I found that channel surfing through all of them yielded not one with live NASA coverage. Now ponder this. Centauri Dreams is based near North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, with three major universities within easy driving distance. The woods are full of PhDs, the area priding itself on high tech.

With all these resources, there was not a single cable channel that could be devoted to the first mission to Pluto/Charon ever launched. You can imagine what kind of fare was available on many of the channels that were available. Around the same time, I also noted the slowdown in NASA servers as the launch progressed and received e-mails from people who were having trouble accessing NASA TV. Thus the attempt to post updates on the launch holds yesterday, although it seems absurd to be posting breaking news on a site devoted to research. We are, after all, surrounded by digital information sources of all kinds, some of which should be carrying the ball when it comes to covering science.

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=513

Very true. If something bad happens during a launch it is very often near "Max Q", i e maximum dynamic pressure. This applied to both Challenger and Columbia for example. Max Q typically occurs at something like Mach 2 and 50,000 feet.
I suspect that it was this "Max Q" problem that made Burt Rutan select the seemingly unnecessarily complicated air-launch concept for Spaceship One. By launching the ship that high he actually kept the dynamic pressure within limits where off the shelf rudder actuators etc could be used, despite a Mach 3+ top speed. This may have been a factor in the rather extreme feathering concept - to loose as much kinetic energy as possible high up where the air is thin.

tty

Yep. Mercury-Atlas 1 blew up at Max Q -- in front of all the Mercury 7 astronauts, who had been invited to see the launch. They were not amused, especially since this was one of the few unmanned Mercury flights without the escape rocket and so they only got the capsule back in little bitty pieces. (The next time an Atlas failed -- on MA-3 -- the escape rocket worked and the capsule was recovered intact.)

And the first Atlas-Centaur test in May 1962 also blew up at Max Q after one of the three ejectable insulating panels on the side of the Centaur hydrogen tank tore away. They didn't try again for 18 months. (Centaur's development gave NASA absolute catfits -- they didn't get all the serious bugs out of it until October 1966.) When I saw Challenger explode, my first belief was that the top of the external tank had caved in at Max Q or close to it, but of course I was completely wrong -- it's been a while since they had a failure at that point, but it will always be a risky moment.

Yeah, learning about dynamic pressure, what it is and why it is important, was a big part of my growth as a rocket engineer. Growth from drawing rockets in the margins of my notebooks in school (elementary school) to drawing rockets in the margins of my notebooks in school after doing a great deal of math first (graduate school).

Its worth pointing out I'm a masters of education program...

--Nick

Just to share, I made Astronomy Picture of the Day today:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060124.html

pretty cool!

Congrats and yes, very cool! How did you do it without your and/or the camera becoming a crispy critter?

Ben:

Congratulations, too - I presume you used the good ol' sound operated camera setup...

Bob Shaw

Ben,

Congrats! Wow that is one fantastic picture! Great job.

To answer my own question earlier, those of you who missed the launch webcast, there's a very nice archive on The Spacearium. Among others, it has a clip running from T-4 until T+5, the post-launch press conference as well as a number of launch replays are available.

HOW ON EARTH DID I MISS THIS?!?

New Horizon used liquid, rather than solid boosters. The 'nod' may have been when more thrust was added after dynamic pressure concerns were reduced.

The Shuttle boosters are solids, so the thrust is controlled by the propellant grain contour: The more grain surface area, the more thrust. There is another subtle difference: Most solid motors burn from the inside out, so there is an inertial column the length of the motor. In a liquid engines, and liquid boosters, the combustion chamber is at the bottom, so it is more like a balanced pencil on the tip of your finger - slightly more prone to wobble than a solid rocket motor.

The Atlas V 551 uses 5 solid rocket motors + the RD180 engine, so considerably more than half the thrust at launch comes from solid motors.

Doug

Thanks, yep the remote sound activated camera. I escaped this time. If you want to read more on how we get those kinds of shots, I wrote up an article yesterday:

http://www.popphoto.com/idealbb/view.asp?t...=45561&pageNo=1